Silhouettes for Concept Art Factory Design Challenge

Hey everyone, we are in week 13 of the SCAD Concept Art Factory Club sketch challenge. Usually we do a speed paint but this time we want to focus on design rather than the illustration aspect of Concept Art. All good concept art pieces start off with that nugget of idea which we develop into quick drawings called Silhouettes. In the silhouette stage, we try to use surface shapes to develop the personality of the character we are trying to create.

This week, members of the club choose any sort of theme they want, whether it is robot wars, or space western. They then choose two characters from the story they have developed and create as many thumbnails as they can in the 90 minutes period. For my theme, I chose Space Western with Asian theme.


The two characters I will be developing are the smuggler and the lawman.

When I started designing the smuggler, I thought about clint eastwood and the stereotypical bandito from western films. They usually wear the iconic poncho and hat. I took the idea of the poncho, but changed the sombrero to the asian bamboo straw hat. I also made sure the poncho covers only a portion of the body to make the silhouette look asymmetrical. The smuggler in my story is a lone wolf and is dangerous so the asymmetry makes him look less orderly and more chaotic. I chose the snake as a motif for the character because the poncho creates a silhouette similar to the hood of a cobra. The contrasting creature to the cobra would be the eagle.

For the Law man, I wanted to use the eagle motif as a contrast to the smugger's cobra. I also remember judge dredd with eagle wings as the shoulder pauldron design. I initially tried some armors but the lawman ended up looking very much like mercenaries and soldiers than "lawman". Robo cop didnt work either because he looked more soldier than lawman. That's when I remembered the rangers from Fall Out had armor and the cowboy hat so I took that idea and ran with it.