Hello Everyone! With another year come and gone, we like to take a quick look back at what was great during the past year and give you guys an insight at the upcoming year! Concept Cookie is just barely over a year old and the amount of support and feedback has been humbling and I am grateful for every single follower and subscriber concept cookie receives.
CONCEPT COOKIE
For those who are new to the site, Concept Cookie is a branch of the CG Cookie training network. My name is Tim Von Rueden and I graduated with a degree in Game Art and Design. Concept Cookie began up after I was hired as a concept artist for CGCookie. After a few months, they took a risk and launched this new site with me at the helm. It was intimidating and I couldn’t thank them enough for the opportunity. Since then we have learned and expanded the site and have created a “Cookie Community” that has been most helpful in shaping what the site has become and will continue to become in this new year.
LOOKING BACK AT 2012
Over the site’s first year we had some great highlights from creating Eat Sheep, our first iOS game to the newly established courses on the site. Eat Sheep was released back in August on the iPad and it was a great experience to be a part of this team. Here is the game’s official website for more details: EAT SHEEP
We had a great year in Contests with our Winter King, Modern Vampire, Original Eat Sheep Monster, and Coloring Kara Contest. These contests are a great way to test out your current skills and enter your chance to win some great prizes. You can be sure to expect more of these for the new year!
2012 was filled with amazing digital artists that took the time to interview with us. I can’t stress enough how invaluable these interviews are and the insight that they provide is incredible. I seek out artists that I admire and that means across the globe. It is an honor whenever they get back to me and are willing to answer our questions. These can always be found under the “community” tab up top under “interviews”. This past year we had the privilege of interviewing Lane Brown, Ruan Jia, Daarken, Peter Mohrbacher, Matt Kohr, Cameron Davis, Lois, Cyril Rolando, and Andrew Johnson.
Citizen Member Benefits
Citizen members are the fuel keeping our CG Cookie tanks going. If you would like to become a member yourself, check it out here: Citizen Membership
If you are on the fence about signing up, here are a few reasons why you should join.
Not only do you receive all the exclusive resources, downloads, and tutorials from Concept Cookie but across the CG Cookie network. This means all the exclusive contest on Blender Cookie, Max Cookie, and Unity Cookie. So you can receive a full education from Conception, Modeling, to taking it into a Game Engine.
Courses are Citizen Exclusive
We have introduced courses as well across all the cookie sites and concept cookie was no exception. First, we had the Character Concept art course with the Natalia Course, looking in each of the standard steps in creating character concept art. In June the Software brothers made their appearance in this short Stylized Characters Course. October was the month of the Creature Course and this took the viewer through the different surfaces and textures of a creature. And the latest one from last month is the Pixel Course, which took an in-depth look at getting started in pixel art.
Lastly, we had a slew of resources available for you guys to download and use in your own work. This includes Turnarounds, Brushes, References, Anatomy, and so much more! For most of these, I include a free sample for everyone to download but to get access to the majority of them, you must be a citizen member to download.
CONCEPT COOKIE’s ACROSS THE INTERNET
The site has grown into other sites across the wonderful internet and if you belong to any of these pages and would like to follow us there as well I have listed each of those sites below!
Facebook Page: This is where every update on the site, what’s happening at the studio, and just great art posts that I stumble across will be posted.
Youtube Page: Our free tutorials are now being hosted on this page along with timelapses and intro videos to courses to act as a sneak peek.
DeviantArt Page: I have been on DeviantArt for years, so for those who would like to follow us on here as well, feel free to subscribe and you may receive a llama!
Twitter Page: This is soley for new tutorial and site updates. So no worries if you do not like random postings on twitter. I do not compose any 
CGHub: CGHub is a site full of inspiring and professional standard artwork and will be another place to find our top resources and tutorials.
Tumblr: The newest site I have attached Concept Cookie to is Tumblr after finding some of our images already on the site reposted from someone else.
THE OUTLOOK OF 2013!
For this next year, we have a few plans already set and in production. We are going to be adding a slew of new resources from turnarounds, reference sheets, photo references, and life model references. You can always look forward to a new contest every new season (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall) and a new course roughly every other month.
ABOVE ALL ELSE: What would YOU like to see?
This is a site dedicated to provided resources and helpful tutorials for the cookie community to grow and strengthen their digital art skills. In the comment section let us know what you would like to see next, whether it be a specific topic, resource, tutorial, brushes, etc. Whatever it may be we wanna hear it because you never know if your suggestion will be exactly what we create next!
Great article!
Thank you!
I would like to see shapes or textures added to the resources, and possibly some more of those awesome environment tutorials, cuz I needz them!
Thanks for your suggestions and textures are already in progress! What would you like to see in terms of shapes? I should be able to add those pretty quickly if it’s what I think you’re talking about but I want to make sure I know exactly what you mean =]
For shapes, I was thinking of possibly random magical symbols that can be added as an ornamental decoration to character armor or clothing.
As for specificity, I’m not entirely what to focus on, but I know there’s things like the Celtic symbol on Thor’s hammer or alchemy symbols.
I think that it would be amazing if you could do a course on the basics. How to draw a body that shows movement. Anatomy, how to draw the body in different positions. Also how colors work together, contrast, what color to use, how to know when to go for saturated or unsaturated colors. Things like this. I think that the basics are really important and that they will be helpful for a lot of people. For example in the Natalia course you got very a bit in depth on how to draw the face, from the head structure, to the eyes, to the nose, to the mouth. It was very helpful for me since i had trouble drawing faces and i always had to use references to draw them, but while doing the Natalia course i learned this simple yet very useful method and i almost don´t need references anymore, i still have to practice a little bit more
P.S: sorry for the HUGE paragraph
Agreed, it seems there has been a lot of feedback wanting a basics type series. I’m setting one up now to include Layout, Customization, Setting Up, Layers, Brushes + Erasers, Masking, Blend Modes, Filters, Keyboard Shortcuts, and Where to go from there! After I get that whole series done then I’m thinking I could dive into a Fundamentals one which would delve into value shading, color intro, things like that! No need to apologize for the long paragraph, i enjoy reading the comments!
Awesome
I can’t wait for it, specially the value shading and color intro 
Noel does have a point, we need more tutorials on basics. I think we need some tutorials on creating smoother brush strokes and other techniques regarding tablets. Your seting up a tablet video was good btw Tim!
Hey Time Thanks for a great post, and a great years content too. As always I vote anatomy, I never can get enough.
I also have some specific questions, but I am unsure of were to post. My questions don’t always directly fit with the tutorials that you post so I don’t really like to post “off topic” questions. A forum or discussion page would be really helpful.
A quick example of a topic I would love to discuss in depth is body proportions. 8 Heads? 7 1/2 Heads? Start with Rogers or Peck or Loomis? Already this could become a really large conversation and this is sure to be the tip of the iceberg…
Thanks man, and yeah there has been talk of a CGCookie forum for quite some time now, it keeps going back and fourth and whether or not to pursue it. Who knows, maybe with the 4.0 launch we might see forums but I’ll keep you posted on that!
How about this. I know Photoshop is popular. I can’t afford it. It looks like they are similar enough that it doesn’t really mater with this university. But ….
Suggestion: Have your tutorial, reviewing how to do it in Photoshop. Then, like an appendix, you could add a written Note about how to do it in GIMP, or something. I mean, Photoshop, you load brush presets with the brush. ¿How would we get the same result in GIMP where that doesn’t seem to happen?
¡Oo, ¡oo! I know, a set of tutorials focused on how to get such results from Gimp, or …,
How about Sketchbook Pro I use it instead of Photoshop… I agree some alternative program tutorials would be nice.
Yeah we had a large discussion about whether or not to keep concept cookie software focused or not but we decided that Concept Cookie will stay software neutral, keeping most of what we do in the tutorials able to do on any software. For the tutorials that are Photoshop specific, I would be more than happy to include a segment in the description about re-creating the same effect in Gimp etc.
This would be great. I think I’d like just a bit more added to the GIMP tutorial that was started. Just to get me going with GIMP.
Tutorials on the use of things like all the tools, filters, adjustment layers. You know…. everything
Can we expect to see some Eat Sheep related content anytime soon?
We are still expecting to release Eat Sheep on the iphone and android sometime and as of now I have been in the process of converting the art book to the iPad format so that it’s set for easy reading. I hope that we continue on with the game, add a new environment or two, and flesh out the story a bit more!
A detailed look at common uses for all of the different types of brushes would be very helpful. A lot of concept artists seem to create their own custom brushes, but as a beginner I don’t know what to do with most of the presets let alone know how to go about creating a custom brush for a specific task.
What about a quick article on the type of hardware we should look out for when we want to get a good PC to use Blender on?
I’ve noticed that on the CGcookie facebook page mostly (well, really, everyone) is using a mac. Do you guys render using those laptops/iMacs? Is there anything we could do to optimize those macs (or other PCs) to work well with Blender?
A full blown, longwinded article will get pretty much outdated in… a couple hours. So something short and sweet would be nice.
Something on creating textures for 3D models would be interesting, possibly as part of a crossover series between Blender/Max Cookie and Concept Cookie going from concept sketches and designs to 3D modelled and rigged character/creature.
Yeah, I’ve been wanting to create a mini-series like that with Blender Cookie for a while now, so hopefully something will happen!
Awesome, thanks!
Hopefully I’m not too late. Tim, first off, thanks so much for all these rich tutorials! You do an awesome job explaining and showing. For suggestions, I for one am still at the basics stage. The Value Shading was awesome! I would love to really be able to understand perspective fully. It would be cool to do a perspective course where you start with the basics(simple shapes like rectangles), but then also go into more advanced perspective for more organic shapes like trees, people, etc. I’m excited to see what 2013 holds for Concept Cookie. Again, thanks so much!
Perhaps I am a bit too late, but I just wanted to say that I would love more tutorials on actual design of the basics. On characters for example; what does this shape convey, different sizes of different parts, rounded vs. angled. This varies from style to style of course but I mean more like overall rules. I hope you understand what I am trying to explain!
(Barely I do).
Basically some tips and tricks when it comes to create the first basic shapes/design for what you are working on.