Concepts and Illustration

Using various techniques from simple hand drawn pictures through to highly advanced 3D photo realistic visualisation, Media666 can produce works of art that will capture the attention of your audience. Illustrations can be as simple as a diagram that explains a work flow or they can be sumtuous eye candy that tells a story through vision - anything is possible!

How many times have you sat flicking through a magazine and then stopped on a page because a picture has caught your eye? The brain can evaluate a picture much faster than a page of text and associates it instantly with a product or a subject matter. Imagery is a very powerful way of getting your message across very quickly, which is why you stop on various pages whilst flicking through a publication.

Why not simply use a photograph? Whilst photography is a very powerful medium in itself, your eye tends to lean towards images that are more surreal and unusual. Quite often, a photograph is not enough to get your message across, or the picture you require is impossible to shoot or perhaps the product is in development and does not even exist yet.

Whatever your illustrative requirements, Media666 can give you the edge.

What is the difference between an illustration and a concept?

Illustration in it's most basic form is something that is drawn. It could be a simple chart, a cartoon or a technical diagram. In the past, we used a simple pencil and paper and then coloured it in with paints or markers but today that has all changed. Now we illustrate using computers and various other pieces of technology. Media666 use the latest interactive drawing displays where we can actually draw with a special pen directly on to the computer screen. We can then use natural media simulation to paint, airbrush, sketch or watercolour electronically - you can see axamples on our web based TV channel. The results are amazing (and we can erase things easily when we mess up!).

Concepts are a little different, although there is some cross-over into illustration here. The easiest way to explain a concept is that it is a picture that looks real, but does not actually exist. This could be a product that is still on the drawing board, a picture that tells a story or the merging of photographic and illustrative elements in to one image. In it's simplest form, imagine that you have a photograph of a car taken in a showroom, a picture of a wonderful mountain road and a photograph of an amazing sunset. We can take various elements out of all of these images to produce the car driving along a mountain pass with a beautiful sunset in the background. It takes a lot of skill to make it look convincing as the lighting will be completely different in each picture and all of this would need correcting - which is where some of the cross-over comes in! We may have to airbrush reflections into the car bodywork, add motion to the car etc.

Just to confuse things a little more - with modern 3D Rendering technology, we can produce images from scratch that can look convincingly real! I don't really know whether this is illustration or concept - but it looks amazing! In 3D, we build virtual models on screen, similar to the way that engineers design products. We then create materials for each surface, add lighting and then render. The advantage of this form of illustration is that we can easily change the orientation of the object without completely redrawing as we would have to do with traditional techniques.

If you would like to see more examples and screencast videos of how we produce illustrations please click the TV screen on the right hand side to be taken to our television channel.

Click the image above to watch us draw it, which is the first stage in any illustration - this one will go on to become an airbrushed piece of artwork.

Click the TV above to watch some of our techniques in action, from sketching to 3D illustration.