Professional Practice

Pre-production has a lot of illustrators working in the field and their skills are used in various different ways. There are Character designers, Storyboard artists, Concept artists and Previs artists and many more. One of the most prominent illustrators in the industry tends to be the character designers. They tend, besides making the characters the audience is going to see, influencing the over art style of the project. The characters, when original, tend to be their own making and all of them have something in common tying them to a story visually. Tetsuya Nomura is the character designer for the majority of the Final Fantasy franchise, he has a very distinct art style that can immediately be recognized as are his characters. He tends to give them spiky hair and their fashion tends to be quite outlandish in the sense lots of belts and chains on them. These unique aspects that he focuses on are constant in his designs are able to communicate to the viewer quickly a lot about the character and show what they are from. There is a sense of family and unity in the designs if the characters are occupying the same area. These artists tend to mainly work in animation studios, film studios or in game development, there are more but these are the main fields of work they occupy. When working in these places they typically work under a director or other type of creative lead who will give them a brief, the brief will outline things about the character, requirements about appearances, personality of them and any visual style they need to stick to. Then it's up to the designer to interpret this their own way while still trying to capture what the client asked of them. Time wise it really does depend on the company but what I've seen floating around is 20-30 hours for the basics and 40-50 hours and upwards if it's 3D and being further developed. Because of these they tend to look for highly skilled people for the project with a lot of original ideas. It's not unheard of to move up in the industry and become a creative lead. Tetsuya Nomura started out designing and when his work became as successful as it did he got to direct his own game. This is one in a one million but there is a chance to move your way up.