But what is Concept Art exactly? Here's a brief explanation: any project pertaining to the fields I just mentioned, from the smallest and simplest to the largest and most complicated, starts off with an idea: what the film or animation or game will be about. This idea is then polished into what will be the "script" for the entire creation. And since it's the visual medium, no matter what the "script" is about, it will need to contain elements which must be seen: characters, environments, objects and so on. And the people involved in making the project will need to know what all these things should look like. This is where a concept artist comes in: creating illustrations to help translate the elements of the original idea into images which will serve as "blueprints" for the finished work. So that even if you are making an abstract animation about some moving rectangles, you'll know what size and colour they should be, and what the backdrop looks like.

So you could say that Concept Art is about communicating ideas. And like any other form of communication, Concept Art has its own "language", with its own principles. And it would seem that these principles transcend cultural barriers, such that they can be readily interpreted by most people, even without necessarily being aware of it. But what makes this so? The artist Robert Henri said: "Evaluation (of a person or thing) is based on the sensations which their presence and existence stirs within us"[1], and these sensations are based on our own mental associations, formed naturally throughout our lives. This of course implies a degree of subjectivity, since different people will have formed different associations, but the reason this "visual language" works is because there is a foundation of these associations which is shared. For example: if two people see the same picture of a little house in a meadow at night, with a warm light issuing from a window, they might have differing feelings about the house, based on their experiences, but they will both agree that there must be a light source within the house, casting beams through the window. They will know this immediately, without seeing said source, and without being told of its existence. The idea will have been based upon prior associations, yet it will appear as self-evident.

This "visual language" can then be used to communicate ideas as simple as something being large, or as complicated as something being malevolent. In his article "How the Human Brain Developed and How the Human Mind Works", researcher Manfred Davidmann states: "The right hemisphere of the human brain is able to communicate by using images with the brain's older and more primitive component organs which have no verbal skills"[2]. But this language also generate certain tropes through common use of certain elements to transmit certain concepts. Eventually, these enter into a sort of cycle of self-perpetuation: they are stereotypes because they work well, and they work well because they are stereotypes.