We were lucky to catch up with Verena Lehner-Dittenberger recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Verena, thanks for joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? How does your daily work differ from what you expected it to be?

Managing to turn my hobby into a full time career, able to make a living from it, has been a long, and not always straightforward journey. It requires a lot of hard work, dedication and sacrifice. But looking back now, it is very rewarding to know that I have managed to secure a full time living from being a Concept Artist. I essentially get paid to solve complicated design problems in an entertaining way.

When you draw as a hobby, you always have the choice to draw what you want, and there is no pressure to be good at it because you mostly do it for the process of drawing itself. It’s a fun way to spend your free time. But at the job you have to draw what other people tell you, you have a limited amount of time to deliver, and you have the whole field of professional concept artists and illustrators all over the whole world to compare to. It adds a huge level of stress at first and it’s important to learn how to deal with it. Incorrect comparison is poison for an artist.

But with time I noticed that all these restrictions at work are actually not restricting but a lot of fun to figure out, deal with and solve. At work, you are not asked to deliver the best spaceship design ever made – you are asked to deliver the best spaceship design that is possible to do in X amount of time.

Of course it can be frustrating from time to time to know you could create something better for each task if you just took 3 more days (or months) for it. But it is also very liberating, because without this restriction, you would keep refining that one design forever and ever and ever, instead of moving on to the next task.

In the last couple of years I learned to appreciate the time-boxed aspect of having a concept-art-job a lot, as it proves to be both an intriguing challenge and a huge help to actually deliver designs.

Verena, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hi, my name is Verena Lehner-Dittenberger, and I’m working as a Concept Artist in the Video Game Industry. Before I dive into my journey as a Concept Artist, I want to emphasize my affection towards reading books and stories. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a fantasy story, a science fiction book about a distant planet, a real life report of a guy who experienced the Alaskan Gold Rush first hand, or how it was to grow up on a farm in the Australian outback. Throughout my life, I tried to capture whatever I read, in drawings, to flesh out the scenes that I imagined. Drawing was always my second favorite pastime activity. But what fuels my creativity and eventually led me to become a Concept Artist, working for the video game industry, was my love for stories.

I actually didn’t know for a long time that Concept Art existed. As a kid, I drew levels for the videogames I played, like Spyro the Dragon or Ratchet and Clank, but I didn’t know I could ever make a living out of that. So when I watched the Making of Star Wars Episode 2 on DVD, my 13 year old self was blown away by the fact that some people actually drew all the planets, the spaceships, the aliens. But I still wanted to keep art as my personal hobby because I had no idea how to start, and if I could ever make money from it somewhere in the countryside of Austria. All that changed when I was working an office job after high school, to earn some money while figuring out what I really want to do with my life. During that time, I felt absolutely miserable, especially on Sunday evenings. I didn’t want to go to bed because I knew the next day I would have to get up and spend another week at a job I hated. To me, working there was mind-numbingly boring and soul crushing even though objectively speaking it was a nice job, in a lovely office, with friendly coworkers and a nice boss.
That’s when I slowly realized that I’d rather fail at trying to make it as a Concept Artist, than spending the next 40 years in this job, wondering ‘what if’. It still took me some years to get to where I am right now, and I’m still only at the beginning of my journey, but now I get up every day, amazed by the fact that I will spend it working on a video game, and that I’m creating worlds for a living.

So what is Concept Art actually?
When I first discovered Concept Art back in middle school, I thought it’s about drawing cool stuff for movies and videogames. I didn’t know back then, that you can only see a tiny fragment of the designs that get created for a game – the ones that get selected – and you don’t see the hundreds of designs that get discarded but lead to the final product. As a Concept Artist, you provide solutions for a certain ‘problem’ or question. Let’s say, you get asked to design a gate that leads to a mansion. What could this gate look like? What is the feeling you want the player to experience when he/she stands at the gate? Is it the entrance to the house of a long lost lover, or is it the house of the evil count who’s been terrorizing the country for years? Depending on what the story is, you’ll have to make the gate look differently. And right when you got all the designs done, and the Art Director is happy with your work, all of a sudden a part of the story gets changed, and now there is a car standing right behind the gate, so the gate doors are blocked and can’t swing open. You get asked to redesign it to be a sliding door and not a swing door.
Concept Art is a lot about thinking about the situation, trying to put yourself into the scene, and then providing a visual solution for the problem.

A crucial part of my journey was when I spent a year in a Concept Art Program in Singapore. It was a challenging time with crazy work hours, because the school tried to teach as much as possible in just one year. It was also a time with a lot of personal and artistic growth, and I made some amazing friends there, who influenced and shaped my career a lot.

A bit more than halfway through the year, completely exhausted from working 16 hour work days, I was very frustrated with my projects. I felt like my classmates’ works were much better than mine, they had better ideas, and better execution and art skills. However the problem wasn’t that most people around me were better than me at that point, but that I kept repeating the same mistake over and over again. With each new assignment, I was very worried about not meeting the deadline. So I rushed through the first homework to get to the next homework. Only by that time, I already had a third assignment to take care of, and therefore I rushed through the second one to get to the third one, and the cycle continued.

My friend and classmate Prashant eventually pointed this out to me. He advised me to take as much time as needed to think about the idea for the next project, and really dig deep, before committing to a topic and starting the drawing part of it.
Our next assignment was to design the hunting lodge for a group of hunters who hunt an animal that has to be bigger than a horse.
The first idea that came to my mind almost instantly was to make a project about dragons, because it’s a fun topic and I could make a castle as hunting lodge. But with my friend’s advice, I didn’t rush into that first idea. Thursday passed, and I didn’t have anything else. I finished the other homework assignments and should have started on the hunting lodge to have something to show on Monday morning. Friday passed and I got more restless and frustrated with my ideas (or rather the lack of them). My roommates had already begun working on their drawings, and sitting in a room filled with people who had better ideas than me didn’t really help. I decided to take a walk instead, grabbed a sketchbook and pen and went out into the dark and hot Singaporean night. A bit further down the river I found a nice wall with a meadow behind it. Just as I wanted to sit down, I saw something small moving in the dark on the wall, and I have to admit, I screamed a little while jumping out of the way of the cockroach. Disgusting creatures. We had one in our Air Con before. I hated those insects. If only I could get rid of all of them. And I’m sure you can guess at this point what animal I ended up hunting in my school project. Cockroaches. But giant ones, to go with the restriction of ‘bigger than a horse’. I know that if a cockroach reached that size, it would be crushed by the weight of its own exoskeleton, but hey, a giant cockroach is just as realistic as a dragon.

(On a side note, at that point I did not yet pay attention to the fact that making a project about cockroaches required me to read up on them a lot, and to look at lots of photos. It cost me quite an effort to do so, but when I was done with the project, I am proud to say I didn’t jump out of the way anymore when a cockroach crossed my path, but calmly took a step to the side)

The reason why I’m telling this story is that first of all, it’s important, for personal work as well as job-related-work, to sit back and think. Don’t go with the first idea and learn not to have the pressure of a deadline restrict your creative thinking. I had to re-learn that lesson over and over again, and I’m lucky to have amazing friends like Prash reminding me of it whenever I get stressed out.
And the second reason is that this project has gotten me every art job I have had so far. After Art School, I reworked it a bit and then I shared it on Artstation. In some way, I owe my whole career to this simple school project, and to Prash’s advice.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

There are so many different rewarding aspects to being a concept artist working on video games, that it’s hard to narrow it down to just one. When I quit my day job to pursue an artistic career, I specifically got into this because I loved the process of drawing and sketching, and because I liked video games and movies and thought they provide a good variety of fun topics to draw. And yes, I get to draw every day at my job, and it’s awesome. But surprisingly, that didn’t turn out to be the most rewarding aspect for me.

As it turns out, Concept Art is first and foremost about providing solutions and ideas, and not about how you provide them. Most of the time it doesn’t make a difference whether I sketch on paper, in Photoshop or use a 3D program like Blender to create my designs.
To make an image relatable, you have to do a lot of research. Collect information. How do you want to draw a camel if you don’t know how many toes a camel has? Like the artist and legend Kim Jung Gi said in an interview ‘If you know little, that little is the boundary for what you can draw. If you even know one more thing, that’s one more new element that you can incorporate into your drawings.”

That aspect of detailed research plays directly into my interest in basically everything. Back in school I could not NOT study for an ‘unimportant’ history test, because the topics were so interesting to me. I cared about how the human eye works and enjoyed researching it for biology class, just as much as I enjoyed reading up on subway tunnels in Europe for the underground subway shelter scene I made.
With Concept Art, I managed to combine my love for drawing and art, with my interest in the world, because every project, every art piece, requires researching and discovering something new.

On top of that I get to help tell stories through the art I produce. I’m still at the beginning of my journey but I hope I will be able to continue and work on projects, both at work and in my free time, that inspire people, provoke emotions and excite them in the way stories and videogames have excited and inspired me in my life. And seeing a design I made being used in an actual game, still feels unreal and amazing to me.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

For a few months after my time in Singapore, before I got my first freelance job, I was still learning to understand the basics of art. Wondering how I will ever get to a decent level and when I can earn money with it, I got very confused by Instagram and Artstation. On both platforms I was following a lot of amazing artists who did all kinds of different artworks. Inkdrawing, plein air painting, sketching animals, character designers, beautiful color paintings, amazing landscapes, and a tiny bit of concept art in between. I was convinced I had to master all these different disciplines in order shape my career.

Every other day I saw another artist posting their latest artwork. So I panicked, and shifted my focus, to catch up with that person. That means, every time, for example, Peter Han posted another sketch, I’d panic and think ‘Oh no, I need to sketch more’. Then for example Marco Bucci posted an amazing painting and I would think ‘screw sketching today I need to learn how to paint and make these juicy brushstrokes.” Next, Finnian MacManus would share his latest work and I’d wonder if I should learn how to sculpt with a VR headset.
But at that point I didn’t even know how to post process an image in Photoshop… I should learn that right now.
Then the next sketch got posted on Social Media and the whole circle started again.
To sum it up, instead of sticking to one thing, I moved back and forth between so many things, always feeling like I’m falling behind. I wasn’t making progress in any discipline, didn’t stick to practicing them, and thus there was no visible improvement which was very discouraging.
And all of these things were not what I needed at that time to become a Concept Artist.
I had to learn that there is a difference between Art I admire, and Art I enjoy doing myself. If I see a beautiful character painting, of course I admire it. But will I be happy producing something like that myself? No. After that realization I cleared out my Instagram feed and Artstation following to only follow artists who did the type of art I enjoy producing and the type of work I myself wanted to do, and that I had to learn, in order to pursue this profession. This might sound harsh, and I refollowed a lot of amazing artists since then (because I do love looking at their work), but for that certain time I had to keep my mind focussed on what I needed to practice.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.artstation.com/verena_ld
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/verena.ld.art/