The history
120 years from a magician drawing his own moon sets to whole worlds painted on tablets before a single frame is shot.
Before a film is made, someone has to imagine how it will look. At first directors and set designers sketched it themselves. In the 1930s Disney hired illustrators just to paint ideas that would inspire everyone else, and the job we now call concept art grew from there. Paintings helped sell films, then digital brushes made ideas faster to try, and today big art departments design whole worlds, from Hollywood to Hyderabad.
1929
Oscar for art direction
William Cameron Menzies, USA
1931
Inspirational sketch artist at Disney
Albert Hurter, Swiss-born, USA
1939
"Production designer" credit
William Cameron Menzies, Gone with the Wind
1982
"Visual futurist" screen credit
Syd Mead, Blade Runner
1990
Photoshop 1.0
Thomas and John Knoll, Adobe, USA
1991
Natural-media painting app
Painter, Fractal Design, USA
1991
Cordless pen for a tablet
Wacom, Japan
1999
ZBrush digital sculpting shown
Pixologic, SIGGRAPH
1900 – 1935
Filmmakers and set designers draw and build their own worlds. There is no separate job yet for painting ideas.
1902
Méliès wrote, directed and helped design A Trip to the Moon. He sculpted prototypes for the moon creatures' heads and feet himself, and drew sketches for the film's poster. Historians think he also worked with a painter on the painted scenery.
Why it mattered. It showed that a film's look could be invented on paper and in the workshop before the camera rolled.
1927
10 January 1927
Fritz Lang's Metropolis needed a whole future city. Three art directors designed it, mixing modern, art deco and Gothic ideas. The look was partly inspired by Lang's visit to New York.
Why it mattered. It proved that designers could build a believable world that did not exist yet.
1929
1929 (for films of 1927–28)
Menzies, a trained illustrator, won the very first Academy Award for art direction for The Dove and The Tempest. He planned how films should look with his own drawings.
Why it mattered. Designing a film's look was now recognised as a craft of its own.
1930 – 1960
Disney hires illustrators to paint moods and places that inspire the animators, and Hollywood invents the production designer.
1931
Swiss-born Albert Hurter joined Disney and spent about ten years drawing whatever he liked: odd creatures, cottages, trees and moods. The animators used his sketches as a starting point. He is widely described as Disney's first inspirational sketch artist.
Why it mattered. It created a job whose only purpose was to spark ideas for everyone else.
1935
c. 1930s
The term concept art is often said to come from Disney, which used it as early as the 1930s. At the studio, artists painted ideas for scenes long before animation began. Many different ideas were tried before one was chosen.
Why it mattered. It gave a name to a stage of filmmaking that is now in almost every big film and game.
1937
1936–1939
Tenggren, a Swedish book illustrator, worked at Disney from 1936 to 1939. His paintings of forests, cottages and villages helped set the European fairy-tale look of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940). Layout artists used them as guides.
Why it mattered. A few paintings could steer the look of a whole film made by hundreds of people.
1939
Producer David O. Selznick gave Menzies a new title for Gone with the Wind: production designer. It meant he had the final word on how the whole film looked. He won a special Oscar for using colour to set the mood.
Why it mattered. The job of designing a film's whole look before filming now had a name and a credit.
1940
1937–1941
Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen worked at Disney from 1937 to 1941. His art was used for the Night on Bald Mountain and Ave Maria part of Fantasia (1940). He also painted ideas for a Little Mermaid film that was only made in 1989.
Why it mattered. Concept art can wait for decades and still shape a film.
1943
Ray started work at the advertising agency D.J. Keymer as a junior visualiser. He also illustrated a children's edition of the novel Pather Panchali. That book later became his first film.
Why it mattered. His training as a commercial artist shaped how he planned films in pictures.
1950
1950–1953
Blair joined Disney in 1940 as a colour stylist and travelled to Latin America with Walt Disney in 1941. Her concept art set the style of Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). She used bright, unexpected colours in strong contrast.
Why it mattered. She showed that colour choices in concept art could give a film its whole feeling.
1955
1950–1955
Ray had no written script for Pather Panchali at first. He drew its scenes in pen, brush and ink in a sketchbook, and showed these pictures to people he hoped would fund the film. It came out in 1955 and won prizes around the world.
Why it mattered. A sequence of simple drawings was enough to plan, and to sell, a masterpiece.
1960 – 1990
Paintings and key drawings plan creatures, spaceships and cities, and help directors sell whole films to studios.
1963
1957–1963
Before animating his models, Harryhausen made dramatic key drawings of the big moments, such as a sailor fighting a skeleton in 1957. These plans led to the famous skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). His foundation now cares for an archive of more than 50,000 items.
Why it mattered. One strong drawing of a key moment can guide months of frame-by-frame work.
1964
Walt Disney asked Blair to help design the It's a Small World ride for the 1964 New York World's Fair. The finished ride closely follows her style. It was later rebuilt in Disney parks around the world.
Why it mattered. Concept art could shape real places people walk through, not only films.
1969
Ray kept a red cloth notebook, a kheror khata, for each film. It held notes, sketches, music and storyboards. The one for Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969) has been digitised with its sketchbook for anyone to explore.
Why it mattered. It shows one artist planning a whole fantasy film by hand, page by page.
1975
Lucas asked McQuarrie to paint several scenes from his Star Wars script. Lucas took the paintings to 20th Century Fox, and they helped convince the studio to fund the film. McQuarrie also designed many of its characters and sets.
Why it mattered. It made the concept painting famous as a tool for selling an idea, not just planning it.
1982
Mead, a former industrial designer, was the first person hired for Blade Runner. He started with vehicles and ended up designing streets, buildings and props. At the same time he designed for Tron, and he invented the screen credit visual futurist.
Why it mattered. It showed how one concept designer could shape a whole imagined future.
1983
Wacom was founded to make pen tablets. Its pens sense how hard you press, using magnetic signals from the tablet, so the pen needs no battery. In 1991 it made pens without a cord.
Why it mattered. Pressure-sensitive pens made drawing on a computer feel much more like drawing on paper.
1988
Oga was art director on Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro. His painted backgrounds of fields and forests gave the film its warm, living feel. In 2007 a Tokyo museum held a show about him called The Man Who Drew Totoro's Forest.
Why it mattered. Background painting and art direction can make a place feel like a character.
1990 – 2010
Pressure pens, Photoshop, Painter and 3D sculpting let artists try ideas quickly and change them without starting again.
1990
19 February 1990
Thomas Knoll wrote a program to show and change pictures while he was a student. His brother John, who worked at the effects studio Industrial Light & Magic, pushed him to grow it. Adobe released it as Photoshop 1.0 in February 1990.
Why it mattered. Layers of changeable digital paint later became the everyday tool of concept artists.
1991
Painter was made to copy real materials like watercolour, oils, chalk and charcoal on textured paper. With a pressure pen, its brushes respond to how you press and tilt. It is now sold by Corel.
Why it mattered. Artists could keep their painting skills and still work digitally.
1995
Lucasfilm hired Doug Chiang, born in Taipei, to lead its art department. As design director he shaped the look of the Star Wars prequels from 1999. Years later he said he designs in the iPad app Procreate.
Why it mattered. Big films began to have whole teams of concept artists led by one design director.
1999
ZBrush was shown at the SIGGRAPH conference in 1999. It lets artists push and pull digital clay with brushes, with millions of tiny faces. Studios like ILM and Wētā FX use it to design creatures and props.
Why it mattered. Designers could turn a drawing into a model you can spin and see from every side.
2000
2000–2003
Book illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe were the lead concept artists for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Set builders closely followed some of Lee's drawings. Lee shared the 2004 Oscar for art direction.
Why it mattered. Concept art connected a famous book's world to the sets, props and effects built for the screen.
2001
2001–2002
Desai was art director on films including Lagaan (2001) and Devdas (2002). He won four National Film Awards for art direction. In 2005 he opened ND Studios near Mumbai.
Why it mattered. Designing a film's world on a grand scale became a celebrated craft in India too.
2010 – today
Large art departments design entire kingdoms and styles, on tablets as well as paper, in India and around the world.
2011
16 March 2011
Procreate, a painting app for the iPad, was released in 2011. Artists at studios like Disney Animation and Pixar now use it. A sketch can start on a train and end up in a film.
Why it mattered. Concept art tools became portable, cheap and easy to learn.
2015
10 July 2015
For Baahubali: The Beginning, production designer Sabu Cyril designed a whole kingdom, including thousands of weapons and armour pieces. About 15,000 storyboard sketches were made before filming. VFX studios such as Makuta VFX in Hyderabad then built its biggest sights.
Why it mattered. It showed Indian cinema designing fantasy worlds at the same scale as Hollywood.
2018
14 December 2018
For Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the team drew and painted comic-book lines, dots and textures on top of 3D frames. Production designer Justin K. Thompson helped set the style. It won the Oscar for best animated film.
Why it mattered. Visual development can invent a brand new look for a whole kind of film.
2022
25 March 2022
Sabu Cyril was production designer on RRR. His team built a big village set and a copy of old Delhi at Ramoji Film City. The film became a worldwide hit, and its song Naatu Naatu won an Oscar.
Why it mattered. Careful design of a past world helped an Indian film reach audiences everywhere.
Did you know?
About 15,000 storyboard sketches were made for Baahubali: The Beginning before filming.
Kay Nielsen's Little Mermaid paintings from the late 1930s waited about 50 years for Disney to make the film in 1989.
The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation looks after more than 50,000 items, including his drawings and models.
Photoshop 1.0 had just one engineer, Thomas Knoll, and was written mostly in the Pascal language.
Satyajit Ray had no written script for Pather Panchali at first: he planned it in drawings.
The people
1883 – 1942 · Inspirational sketch artist · Switzerland
Disney's first inspirational sketch artist, drawing freely to spark ideas for Snow White and Pinocchio.
1896 – 1957 · Production designer · USA
The first person credited as production designer, on Gone with the Wind.
1896 – 1970 · Illustrator · Sweden
His fairy-tale paintings shaped the look of Snow White and Pinocchio.
1886 – 1957 · Illustrator · Denmark
Painted the dark mountain of Fantasia and early Little Mermaid ideas.
1911 – 1978 · Colour stylist and concept artist · USA
Brought bold modern colour to Cinderella, Alice, Peter Pan and It's a Small World.
1921 – 1992 · Director, designer and illustrator · India
Planned his films in sketchbooks and red notebooks full of drawings.
1920 – 2013 · Stop-motion animator · USA
Drew dramatic key drawings before animating his famous creatures.
1929 – 2012 · Concept artist · USA
His 1975 paintings helped Star Wars get made.
1933 – 2019 · Visual futurist · USA
Designed the future cities and vehicles of Blade Runner and worked on Tron.
born 1952 · Art director and background painter · Japan
Painted the forests and fields of My Neighbor Totoro.
born 1962 · Design director · Taiwan and USA
Has led Star Wars design at Lucasfilm since 1995.
born 1962 · Production designer · India
Designed the worlds of Baahubali and RRR, and has won four National Film Awards.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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