World-building e concept art: inventare e rappresentare mondi immaginari

Illustrations are visual representations and concept art (which must not be confused with Conceptual Art) is a particular form of illustration whose main goal is to visually and graphically convey a concept, an idea, a design, a mood for the different elements which build a ‘world’ and that will represent the soul and identity of a product of the entertainment industry (i.e. videogame, movie, TV series and similar forms of visual entertainment). While in traditional illustration the illustration itself is the final product, the main aim of concept art is to prefigure and visually communicate an idea in the most evocative and effective way, in order to guide the rest of the development team towards the final product. Through their artistic skills (perspective, atmospheric perspective, anatomy, composition, value, light, color theory etc.) and through the use of different media (especially digital ones), concept artists give life to designs of environment, characters, costumes, creatures, props and any kind of asset which build the ‘visual architecture’ of a project. The paper tries to frame and investigate concept art as an active, communicative and informative form of illustration, whose main goal is to shape new imaginary universes and to communicate them through several graphic means and languages to the other professional figures involved in the creative pipeline of a product of visual entertainment.