The Kitchen Sink

I've had a lot of struggles defining myself as an artist because throughout my development people have told me that you need to specialize. Heck, I've told my friends that you need to specialize. I mean in an industry as competitive as ours people starting out need to compete with 20 year veterans, and how can you possibly do that if you try to draw everything? You need to draw like a mad man, it boggles the mind.

The problem is, concept art is about ideas. At its heart I don't believe it's about beautiful rendering or fine art finish. And anyway, how can you tell a concept artist to only be interested in one thing? "I am only interested in vehicles." "Oh no, I care nothing for people, only buildings." I mean, to a point I get we have preferences, but who says that? I can't design the architecture of a fantastic world without imagining the culture and fashions of the people who live there. I can't do a character without imagining where they live, the props and philosophies that define them. It goes round and round.

In this spirit, here is a load of all sorts of things I've been working on since March 4th. So... the last 3 days. I define myself as an environment concept artist, but there really aren't any environments in this dump at all. I just love to draw and design.

Above is a new gun and a heavy duty polish on the gun from earlier this week. I plan to do some more guns ramping up for GDC to round out my portfolio. The top gun I started Tuesday evening, was busy all day Wednesday and finished it Wednesday evening while listening the episodes of Extra Credits. (If you like game design at all, you're insane not to check that show out.)

Further costuming investigative thumbnails for the Blue Guardian visual development project. I did some new thumbs while in the lab helping with a class on Wednesday, then did the tighter line right when I got home, mixing and matching costuming elements.

Further costuming investigation of the Prince character from the same project as above. The methods were the same as well, only difference was I haven't finalized the hair style on the Prince yet, so I keep mucking around with options.

A couple of new 1 hour cinematic speed paintings. I do these every day, usually in the morning for warm up. You can view every day's painting along with the paintings of my friends who are also doing this at our blog, Cinematic Speed.

Mmm. Drawing.