He was fascinated by the works of Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston and immediately knew that was the career he wanted to have. In elementary school, Kyle first learned about Concept Design after he started looking through a copy of the Art of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Kyle Brown grew up in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, where he graduated from the Columbus College of Art & Design with a Bachelor’s degree in Illustration. Kyle Brown Concept Artist working in Film, Television and Games Watch Introduction to Creature Design: Volume 2 With Kyle Brown to explore how to color your creature concepts in Photoshop. To complete the workshop, the final design is translated into a three-quarter pose for the final presentation - whether it’s for your portfolio or a client. The following exploratory process takes the initial thumbnails and fleshes them out into more resolved sketches, varying the shape and design language to create multiple iterations for a creature brief. Advanced thumbnailing follows, where Kyle applies secondary forms while ensuring that everything still reads at a small, bite-sized scale. The workshop then moves into silhouette exploration using simple two-value construction to focus on shapes.

Kicking off with the initial research and methodology phase, Kyle shows the importance of using references to serve as a spark for a new design, inspiring new shapes while always rooting design decisions in real-world anatomy and physiology.

How do you bring an unimagined creature into existence? How big, small, dangerous, or strong should it be? What environment will the creature be occupying and what role does it play? Will it have any unique skills or traits? Kyle discusses how, by applying fundamental design principles you can build a solid foundation to work from, and ultimately create a creature that will resonate with audiences - while still feeling fresh and original. His 3.5-hour workshop demystifies the process of bringing creatures to life, with Volume 1 dedicated to the sketching and idea-exploration phase.īefore delving into the world of creature design, you’ll encounter many questions.

Senior Character and Creature Concept Artist Kyle Brown demonstrates the industry-proven workflows he’s mastered through working on high-profile creature designs for film, television, games, and advertising projects. Blockbuster creatures and monsters all start somewhere: With a sketch.

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