BioWare - Behind the Scenes Concept Art

BioWare Concept Artist Matt Rhodes gives a look back at the concept art of various games he has worked on while at Bioware.

The role of a Concept Artist is the role of an explorer, tasked with charting a world without sunlight. Bear with me here.

You start off with your reference and research. These are well established base camps. They’re well lit, highly populated and safe. The better your reference the better your bearings will be. The artist’s job is to start at base camp with a bag of torches and run furiously out into the darkness. Every doodle, sketch, painting and storyboard is a torch lit somewhere out in the black. You mostly find weeds and rocks out there. But if you keep pushing you sometimes find a rich landscape that can hopefully become a new basecamp.

I was inspired by my friend Hethe Srodawa, who recently posted his most nitty-gritty of concept work: his paintovers. We can tend to keep our less pretty, less refined work hidden away on our drives but I think it paints a disingenuous image of the roll of concept artists. There’s a lot more to the job than the few polished portfolio pieces that get released. Hethe pulled his pants down and it has inspired me to do the same.

What follows is a smattering of rag-tag concepts.Some saw the light of day, some were changed dramatically, some were scrapped entirely. All were necessary.