#hosted webinar

This informative webinar entitled “The Storytelling of Art: A Guide to Concept Design” was hosted on November 28, 2025, from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM, conducted at both Google Meet and Facebook Live. Registration was done via Google Forms, which was announced in the official Facebook page of The Skyrocket Collective. Our resource speaker was Ms. Candice Torres, a 2D artist currently working at Buko Studios. The webinar’s topic revolved around concept art, specifically of how it can be used to communicate stories to the audience:

Concept art as storytelling foundation

Emotion through design, not decoration

Shape language, color, composition, symbolism

Characters, creatures, props, environments as narrative tools

Bridging design, story, and world-building across media

Concept art is one of the first steps that artists take when it comes to developing their ideas and bringing them to life. As someone who enjoys drawing a lot of sketches for concept designing for my own characters and stories, this topic discussed was perfect to listen to and take note off. Our resource speaker presented us a with the basic pipeline of designing concept art, something that she takes into heart when doing her pieces for her artworks, not only for her professional work, but also for her own personal projects.

Along with her discussion, she even presented examples of her works in concept art, also mentioning that she has over 50 clients, even going as far to having customers from foreign countries. She demonstrated how much thought goes around when it comes to these things. Such elements applied in creating concept art include the following:

IDEATION • Mood Boarding – Gather inspiration and research for visualization of the subject for reference • Narrative – Layout of the story, noting important information APPLICATION • Start sketching – Create multiple loose sketches by using your gathered references. • Narrow down – Pick and choose favorite or appropriate sketches, get it ready for development KEY ART • Development – Expand sketches, add necessary and important elements like props character and creatures • Layout – Create infographics of your work, compile all of your concept art

She also points out the importance of color theory and grayscale values in concept art, as these can improve your color palettes, the mood or day & night cycle that you want to convey, and to minimize color distractions in order to focus on the art's form, textures, and lighting. Using motifs is another thing she told us to implement in concept design, as these elements that be something that viewers can point out while they analyze your designs and say "Oh! That's actually very clever! Now it makes sense!". Concept art can be used to illustrate a story to tell people by just looking at it. Once they manage to piece the elements used, they can learn to appreciate the attention to detail you've applied to your creations.

Despite being the host, one of the few things that I loved during the webinar was how our speaker does her rendering styles in her artworks, as if she's one of the artists from Riot Games. The webinar also made way for the QnA portion based on the question we've received via the Google Forms from the webinar's registration period. Out of all the 45 questions and given the time frame we had, these were what she provided as answers:

Using color theory and grayscale to make use of unique color combinations and defining the values in your art pieces.

Art and storytelling have coexisted since the time of cavemen, as evident by the cavemen paintings, which is how scientists were able to decipher how they lived back then.

Use motifs in your concept art! Like emblems or letters on your character designs, or recurring design elements in their background!

Look at other people’s artworks to gain inspiration on what kind of art pieces you want to do. Draw every day, which can feel like a chore at first that can lead to burnout, but it can give you tremendous benefits, like a physical workout.

Avoid overdesigning and over-rendering. “Less is more. Sometimes a simple design is beautiful and enough.”

Take criticisms when asking for feedback from other people. It’s your way of figuring out which works for your audience, and which does not.

This online webinar “Scene Synergy: How to Balance Interactions between 2D Characters & Environment Art” was held on November 22, 2025, which happened online at Google Meet and streamed in Facebook Live, lasting from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM. The registration happened in Google Forms, announced in the official Facebook group page of The Skyrocket Collective, hosted by yours truly, the group under the same name. The resource speaker was non other than Ms. Alyssa Beatrice Dela Cruz, a 2D animator working at Top Draw Animation, Inc. for 2 years. The webinar focused on deepening the understanding of how 2d characters interact with their environments, such as:

Physics grounding in 2D movement

Beginner mistakes in environment interaction

Believable contact points (feet, hands, objects)

Syncing motion with environment elements

Weight, timing, and force for realism

Scene analysis and refinement for synergy

Our resource speaker discussed plenty of things about 2D animation, especially with how 2d character interact with their environments, may it be with props or their surroundings. She mentioned a lot of terminologies, some were familiar, while some were entirely new terms, such as:

contact points - points wherein a character or object makes contact with a surface or another object

overshoot - when an object moves beyond its final position before settling back again

perspective & anatomy – considered as twins in animation, because they are important for depth, realism, movement, and expression respectively.

weight – important to better emphasize the existence of gravity and inertia

horizon point – the viewer’s eye level, where the sky meets the ground, and it’s the anchor for perspective; determines how objects or characters are positioned in a scene, in terms of scale, angle, and perspective.

As our first webinar's host, I had to make sure that everyone wasn't bored during the waiting time and the discussion. It was also neat how my groupmates still managed to contribute by facilitating the invites and the chat moderations in both Google Meet and Facebook Live. We encouraged both the mod team and the participants to interact with our resource speaker, considering that it was in a podcast-style format. We also took the opportunity to answer the questions submitted by our attendees prior to the event from the registration period.

She mentioned how even making a small change on walk or run cycles can give a big impact on how your character feels alive and attached onto the scene you have. Simply just doing a walk/run cycle then just dragging them across the scene isn't enough, you got to emphasize where their contact points are. Adding ground shadows helps, too!

She also showed a couple of examples of 2D animated shows that emphasized the topics she talked about during the webinar, like how the perspective of the background may or may not match the characters' angles, the use of camera shots in the scenes, and how character hold onto props and/or other characters.