Concept Art Process
Within the games industry there is a stage molds the games art style, the first stage of creating the art style and characters for the game is the Exploration Stage. This is the stage where the artists throw around ideas on what the characters/environments should look like, this is purely conceptual and it is subject to change. The art team would try various Anatomical art styles which would fit into the games art style. An example of this in the game League of Legends, new "Champions" in League of Legends would go through various stages of development. Many different designs for a character would be created before deciding on a singular one.
These designs for the character "Graves" would be in the exploration stage, this is evident as there is a lot of variations in these 4 drawings, each have differences from each other which shows that the artist for this has not got a final idea of what the character would look like. Another image of the exploration stage is this.
This one is much different from the previous concept as this image of Graves is further along as they have decided that he would look quite rough, almost like Clint Eastwood facial expression. At this point this character may have a backstory or lore which would alter what he would look like.
After the Exploration stage is completed and a final character art has been created it would then go over to the approval stage. This is the stage of which the final character art is approved by publishers and further worked on creating proper art work, not concepts or sketches. An example of approved art would be this image. This image of Graves is more detailed then the other images as it is the final design for this character.
After the approval stage of the concept art the next stage would be the Promotional Art stage, this is the stage where detailed art word is shown to the public to generate hype as well as awareness.
This piece of promotional is used to show of the new character as well as generate hype for his release. artists would put alot more time into these pieces of art to make it look as good as possible.
Not only do characters go through this design process, both Objects and Environments to as well, both of these are equally important. Art for environment or characters may not even be used in the actual game.
This Promotional art for Runeterra was created for the purpose of the lore of the game, this was created to give the fictional place a face in the sense of that the people reading the lore would understand what Runeterra would look like.