30 March 2017

Chess in Concept Art

In last week's post Chess in Conceptual Art, I used Wikipedia to discover the difference between 'conceptual art' and 'concept art'. According to Wikipedia,

Concept art is a form of illustration used to convey an idea for use in films, video games, animation, comic books or other media before it is put into the final product.

It turns out that most of the examples involve the design of chess sets. Of the 13 images shown below, nearly all are chess sets.


Google image search on 'chess "concept" art -site:pinterest.com'

The keyword 'concept' is in quotes to exclude images from the 'conceptual' domain. I also excluded Pinterest because the site only duplicates original images from other sources and brings little else that is useful.

The most intriguing image is in the top row, third from the left: Concept art like chess battle (deviantart.com). The attached explanation -- 'The game should be in strategy but in real time where you get to move freely but position characters in tactical situations' -- is somewhat incoherent, but the artwork stands on its own.

The leftmost image in the second row also goes to Deviantart.com (as did all of the images in the previous post, 'Chess in Conceptual Art'): Chess Concepts, 'Character ideas for a chess based game in the works.' Although not immediately obvious, the drawing also depicts a chess set; first row: Bishop, Pawn, Rook (the big thing with its knuckles on the ground), King, Queen, Knight.

Not shown above is a complete comic book, as in Thread: Chess comic (conceptart.org), 'This is the first comic I've made, an instructional comic about chess, I'd really appreciate some honest feedback and ways to improve'. One page shows castling as a move of the Queen and Rook, which is why concept art can be useful to get the bugs out early.

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