Feng zhu is a well known American concept artist who has worked with various Hollywood studios and game developers throughout his career. After studying architecture at the ‘UC Berkeley’ and industrial design at the ‘art center college of design’ in Pasadena his career began in 1997 where he worked for ‘origin systems’ (today known as Electronic arts) creating futuristic backdrops for movies and games. The image below shows one of many concepts he created for the ‘star wars revenge of the sith’ movie. in this particular image he has left the construction lines in to show us how he composed this piece, you can clearly see that he has used perspective drawing methods to give of the illusion that the spaceship in the center exits in a dimensional environment. This is made clear by how all of the straight lines are converging towards one point which seems to be located in the top left corner. In the movie the sith are depicted as the bad guys so by using dull colors that have evil connotations (red and black, usually linked to the devil) the viewer can quickly pick up on the fact that this is the layer of the villains.
Another example of how feng zhu creates the illusion of depth in his environments is shown in the image below. Although it’s not finished and it does not contain any color feng zhu still manages to convey a sense of depth and distance by just using different values (value- how light or dark a color is). As you can see in the image below he manages to give this piece a sense of depth and distance by making objects which appear to be closer darker in their value where as objects in the distance are lighter in value and harder to make out (if you look into the distance in real life this will happen)
In this next image feng zhu applies this method of giving his pieces a sense distance but this time he uses colors. When adding color he makes the closer object more saturated and darker and the farthest colors dull, desiderated and lighter. Also in this image he manages to draw attention to the focal point (the mountain in the top right) in many different ways. The first of which and most obvious is he puts the brightest color on the highest mountain in the image, since human eyes are almost always attracted to bright colors first doing this should ensure that the first thing that is looked at is the mountain. He also takes more subtle approaches in the way he brings attention to the top right of the image, for example the three characters located at the bottom left of the image are all looking at the mountain, if the blue glow of the mountain didn’t grab the attention of the viewer straight away after looking at the three character the viewer might get curious as to why they are staring into that direction if they do their eyes will be directed to the mountain. Another way he brings attention to the top right corner is the way he uses an unseen light source (coming in from the left side of the image) to light what seems to be a path which leads to the foot of the.
As well as his environment concept designs feng zhu is also well known for his vehicle, creature and character designs. For the 2010 remake of the movie tron feng zhu was given the task of redesigning some of the vehicles otherwise they would have look a bit dated. On the top left I put the image of what the original tron bike looked like, the rest images below show the different variants feng zhu came up with while redesigning this bike. As you can see feng zhu was not trying to completely redesign the tron bike but instead he just improves and modernizes the original bike, he does this by making the body of the bike look more modern and practical than it originally did (making the body of the bike streamline and making it closer to the ground like bikes today). When drawing concept for vehicles feng zhu’s style of drawing changes (this can be seen in his other vehicle designs as well). He doesn’t put as much effort into painting but instead he focuses on getting as much detail to show through the line drawing, im guessing he does this so when his designs are being looked at or someone is trying to recreate them they don’t have to struggle trying to find all the detail.
Education has played a big part in feng zhu’s career so in 1998 he to created a website in which he uploaded free tutorials which helped people who wanted to become concept artists. The site quickly grew popular so he decided to start uploading his videos to YouTube. To date he has uploaded 68 video’s in which the topics range from character design, painting techniques and how to make a professional looking portfolio. The image below is from one of his earlier tutorials, in this tutorial he mainly focused on the composition of a painting and using value.
After his online successes in 2009 feng zhu created the FZD School of design which is based in Singapore. His school specializes in teaching pupils the skills that will be needed of them if they intend on working in the entertainment industry. The course his school teaches cover a range of topics such as video games, consumer products and films.
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