emails and then one or two polite
follow-up messages.
Your portfolio should prove you’re
ready to start immediately; that you
understand the company’s style.
Alternatively, you could build a
portfolio that demonstrates your own,
unique style. This is a bit riskier, but
your style or speciality might offer the
thing that company is currently
missing. Ben’s portfolio is a mix.
Feng says there are three main
positions for concept artists. Seniors
create “world-building images such as
lead characters and environment
establishing shots” and “are rarely
involved in labour intensive work.”
Mid-levels also design characters and
environments, but they’re still required
to roll up their sleeves and do some
labour-intensive stuff. Juniors do all of
the hard work: designing variations,
doing orthographics, cleaning up line
drawings, and extracting line details
from digital paintings that have been
created by seniors or freelancers.TALKING SHOP
Ben believes that being good at art is
only half the job. You need to be a
great communicator. If you’re an off-
site freelancer then this skill is
especially important because it’s
unlikely you’ll be able to speak to
people face to face. You need to know
to give the client what they want. You
sometimes need to help the client
work out what they want, too.© Lucasfilm
© LucasfilmImagineNation News
Christian’s first image
on The Force Awakens
was portraying Luke
Skywalker as “a Colonel
Kurtz-type hiding from
the world in a cave.”“Most designers who stand
out are just doing what
they love,” says Feng“Salvage pirates racing to get first dibs on a
crashed ship,” reveals Christian, on an unused
storyboard for The Force Awakens.