The Key to Mastering Concept Art

The Key to Mastering Concept Art

Faizal Ab shares his journey from being a background designer to graduating into a senior creative associate. He talks about his journey in concept art and emphasises on the invaluable experience he gained in the process.

Faizal Ab’s journey to being a designer has been quite intriguing and diverse in its own way. One that implies a good example of using formal education alongside personal insight and experience to grow at one’s craft.

After completing his twelfth grade, Faizal chose to go directly into a fine arts college to follow his passion, thereby graduating with a degree in fine arts. Post that, he chose to go in for a Master’s diploma in Animation, during which period he also found a job as an art teacher at Seventh-day Adventist Higher Secondary School in Ottapalam, Kerala, so as to support himself. Furthermore, having completed the animation course, he joined an animation studio in Kochi as a background designer and is now working as a senior creative associate.

Faizal has mainly worked as a BG artist throughout most of his time and finds the experience he thereby gained in light & shade study, water-colouring and the likes to have helped him a lot towards creating concept artworks. For the watercolour effects, for example, which he applies using Adobe Fresco, it is this experience that he largely uses to first conceive them in his mind.

Regarding his concept background work, Faizal usually follows a particular method, first creating the rough sketches and further collecting references for that artwork. “It’s really helpful to enhance the work and detailing,” he says, “after which I create the final layout before going to the colouring part.

Nowadays, I am using more digital mediums for the purpose of creating since it’s very comfortable and convenient. Mainly, we can edit or modify the artwork at any given point of time as we prefer and achieve good results in lesser amounts of time.”

Failzal’s style depends on his mindset and imagination at that given moment. Likewise, some artists’ artworks consciously or subconsciously tend to influence their creations. He is now trying to study different styles of creating so as to recreate or re-innovate his artwork, considering how there are so many varied opportunities for artists to choose from according to their abilities.

Speaking of his own influences, Milind Maulik’s watercolour works, Raja Ravi Varma’s oil paintings, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Victor Perard and other such artists impact him the most.

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