Entry 2 - Visual Library

Hi, David Bush here. This is my second entry into my Games Art & Design blog. In this post I will be discussing a topic generally known as a visual library.

What is a visual library?
A visual library consists of images captured by your mind during the years of your life. These images influence and affect what you can create when given a visual challenge such as creating concept art for games, advertisements and films. A visual library is very important if you want to become a good artist, BUT I will emphasise here at this point that understanding the fundamentals and practising your artistic abilities are just as important too if you want to be a good concept artist. A good visual library will allow you to gain an instinct for how objects should appear and look in your artwork. With a good visual library you will be able to create artwork more efficiently as you will already know how things look like instead of researching for images all the time. A good visual library will also make your artwork seem functional as you will have an understanding of how things appear visually and you will be able to use this understanding to solve problems when tackling issues in your concept art design.

What type of visual library do you have?
Typically there are two different types of people when it comes to a visual library. Those who have observed and seen plenty of different things in their life and know how things are supposed to look and have acquired a visual library with a lot of variety and information. Then there are those who have not spent a lot of time observing or seeing and understanding different things visually. The first type of person will be able to recollect visual information from memory and utilise the visual information to create artwork or depictions of things such as insects the way they are supposed to look. Then there is the latter who does not have that information in their visual library because they never obtained that information and will have a vague amount or absolutely no visual information on certain things, and this type of person will make artwork that is not designed well and vaguely looks like how that person would like it to.

How you can improve your visual library?
A visual library can improved by carrying out these five activities/tasks that I will mention. These activities were covered in a YouTube video by Feng Zhu that covers the same topic I am discussing. If I did not see his video then I would have nothing to discuss here today with you. Thanks Feng Zhu FZD - Visual Library Video. So I will pass on to you his advice in this section in numbered importance as it was passed on to me, number 1 being the most important and descending from there.

1. Books – These are some good books that Feng Zhu recommended: The Hobbit, The Road, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, George Orwell's 1984. Books can take your mind on an adventure and get your brain thinking and force visuals into your mind of things that may never have existed before. BOOKS ARE VISUAL CHEATING as Feng Zhu put it. This is because if you read a lot of books you will never run out of designs. These designs you see from reading are genuine and belong to YOU as even though it is a copyright piece of text the image that results in your mind was created by your thoughts and this means that the writing in the book was a mental catalyst and nothing more. If you are wondering if you should read certain types of books to do this then do not worry because books from any genre are all good for your visual library.
2. Nature – Nature is seen very often even though we sometimes do not realise it. Nature contains existing designs that no one owns and you can reverse engineer these designs and features into your own artwork as for example learning the reason for why elephant ears are so big is for heat dispersion, and why zebras have stripes is for camouflage. If you are designing a creature or building which needs these details for it's functionality then you can copy it from nature as it is cool and plausible. Forms are very perfect you can steal forms and shapes since they work even out of memory with other ones in the design. ALL their features have a purpose and a reason. You could use zebra stripes on armour for example and this may be a bad or a good design but it is design.
3. Travelling – Travelling gives you a lot of retained feelings and images which contain visual information from the experience of seeing the scale of places that you can never feel through a photograph or a film such as Paris and being on top of the Eiffel tower, Hong Kong, Tokyo's Shibuya area and you apply this retained feeling when designing and criticising the function and details in your artwork. Another detail of travelling is the smell and sound for example you can recall certain things in say Paris that a certain colour or appearance of a river that is there adds a smell and you may put a certain smell in a piece of artwork and remember what things bring that to the piece for the feel of it.
4. Museums – Museums will give you understanding. Museums are built to show and explain and teach things they are not just pretty buildings with pretty things. These museums can contain anything useful such as art, tanks and planes. Museums will also give you a feel of scale of things that most people will never usually see. Feng Zhu recommended the London History Museum and Louvre in Paris. You can also find elements in your favourite games that are in museums like the renaissance in assassins creed.
5. Games and Films – These will give you an understanding of what technology is capable of, and you will need to understand the limit of current technology of the platforms you create artwork for by looking at what is out there currently. You can also see existing designs for example if you are looking at powers suits like in the game Crysis they are already there for you to look at. You will also notice industry trends for example if you look at Skyrim then you will notice it set a trend and consumers like that game and will want more so if you make something popular at the time then you can sell it easier as there is an active market already there.

What can ruin your visual library?
Unfortunately there are also activities that will NOT help your visual library as an artist and will waste your time if you are determined to become a professional.

1. AVOID – Playing video games - This is really bad and is a waste of time for students as they need to learn, go do one of the other FIVE things mentioned, professionals can play games since they don’t need to learn as much. Watch YouTube videos of games to do number five to see everything in the game instead of wasting money and time going through the games progress.
2. AVOID – Fan Art - Go and combine visual information from the five good visual library activities instead of copying other peoples work as it puts you under suspicion since professionals looking at your portfolio will notice the copied elements from existing characters. You are looking at someone else's design and you need to do the five visual library activities to get your own visual design. Fan artists are illustrators and not designers.
3. AVOID – Watching TV - BUT if you are watch discovery channel or something good and not crap.

That's the end of what I have in store this entry, feel free to comment below, thank you for reading and take care.