Sessional Intructor

I believe to have mentioned in earlier posts about my part time concept art night class I teach at VanArts in Vancouver as part of their game-art/entertainment-art program.

Presently, I've been on staff with them for the past couple of years, and it's become my weekly outlet to paint and get jazzed with the contagious enthusiasm from the students.
I want to take this opportunity to post, describe, and organize some of the works from in class demos with everyone!

I'm hoping this will be benefitual for current, past, future students, and friends who are curious about the class to have a quick glance, line of sight, and reminder of some of the lessons and painting processes we discovered and practiced.

I will be updating frequently with new and older assignments to share. So keep an eye out for new images!

3D Paint Overs

This image was an outcome of showing how 3D artist's can quickly describe a scene by using their strength in modeling to help out weight their confidence in drawing. I find by doing 3D paint overs with students/3D artist really work well, last thing we want is to be held hostage by our art capacity to communicate an idea.
In this type of sketch, I consider the 3D to take care of most of the drawing, for everything built is structurally sound, in perspective and graphed out. All we need to focus on is the lighting/mood, textures, and painting out the rest of the scene. The less problem's we're solving all at once, the better, and less stressful it'll be.
Personally, during production, especially working with level design, I tend to do lots and lots of these paint overs for speed, and consistency with what they have laid out as a level/gameplay space and economizing 3D art assets.

Party Assignment

This assignment is adopted from when I was at Sheridan. Always one that was memorable to me when I was studying there. The objective of this assignment is to create an scene and illustrate it from 2 different camera views with out changing anything from the scene in both shots. Take away from this exercise I found is better understanding of 3D space in a 2D image. Measuring distances in perspective, rotation of objects, and consistency.
Where I found these practices most useful outside of the everyday sketches was when I got my first taste of generating layouts for 2D animation, shot by shot needed to stitch up seamlessly and correctly.
These are just the thumbs from the class. I will add the final image as I do want to paint these two out when I'm free.

Speed Painting

These are two in class speed painting's where I demonstrated quick and dirty rapid-vis concept sketches. The take away from doing this exercise is to speed up our painting process, training our artistic integrity to care less of execution, less precious with our works, allowing the designs to run loose and free. The 2 above are generated with-in 20-30 minutes. I introduced this exercise to students by having them do speed painting jams with other classmates, artists and friends. 2 people start, and then swap after 10-15 minutes, spend an rotation time (another 10-15 minutes) before swapping back to finish the sketch we originally started. Several rotations or lengthier swap times is all up to us and what we're comfortable with. Again, it's all about not being precious with our brush strokes and artworks, and gaining speed with our painting/sketching.

Painting downstairs

Now that I have no studio to go to work, and with a home environment that is far too distracting during the day; I have been very very lucky to be offered to jam in solitude at my friend's place when they're gone during the day. This has been an awesome setup since I started settling in this week. The apartment is actually my neighbor's Susanna + Sebastian's right down stairs from mine. Traveling time to work is now about 20 secs, having lunch with the family is as easy as going up stairs, and the place is quiet and cozy with their two cats, Miso + Ming, keeping me company. So far so good!

That aside, based off the NDA situation with the artworks I've done the past year, it leaves me with nothing to post unless I sit down and generate new personal works. It's portfolio time for me as well, so the motivation is working out quite nicely. I merely want to take advantage of my free time before I start getting busy with client work again.

For this set:
I've been jamming on a set of images that I want to belong in one direction and universe. My objective is mainly to showcase how I would handle science fiction worlds.

Here's the first one from yesterday's sitting!



*I'll be updating this post as the images get finished, if all goes well, I'm aiming for one a day.

Leap of Faith

After a long tour of duty with my most recent project, I've decided to make a bold change in my life and give freelancing and contracting concept artworks a try.
A leap of faith to strive for a creative space and livelihood that I ultimately would like to obtain.

For now, I have lots to learn and experience with the business end. I’ve already got my first experience of what the waiting head space, finalizing contracts, scheduling to best help the one's who’ve shown support feels like. Something I’ll need to get used to for sure, time management, accounting, and all the other elements freshly discovered.

All of this simply stems back to my creative appetite to try a hand at different problem statements on the regular and allow time to mature my own artistic voice on the side. I had a set-up such as what I’m describing a few years ago, where I was part of a central concept art group for EA. I had many opportunities to touch different games with-in short time frames, always changing it up, keeping fresh. I really enjoyed it, and is what’s appealing in these next steps to constantly challenge myself.

The inexperienced side of my situation does make me feel honestly nervous about it all, being responsible for my family’s livelihood is quite heavy.
Luckily my lovely partner Shari and a few others from the industry have been very supportive of my decision, and it does ease my butterflies quite a bit.
If in fact I’m not suited for freelance work after trying it out, I’ll go back to working fulltime. But at least I would have gave it a good shot and gain that experience in life.


Life drawing drop-in sessions:
10am-1pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays sounds awesome doesn’t it? I have the time now! :D

Where does the time go?

Wow! I haven't posted anything since January!
Quite telling how occupied I've been the past six months.
Where does the time go?

I've been feeling simply overwhelmed with work loads and home responsibilities that it seems to be always a catch up game, and a battle for free time.
I'm sure this is common for most artist's working in the field who have also entered parenthood for the first time.
Quite shocking to think of when we once had so much time we were thinking of ways to kill time.

Regardless, I need to make an bigger effort to free myself up to chase ideas that I've been bouncing for personal projects. The soul's hungry for it.
Ultimately talk is cheap, so lets see what I actually do about it.

Space Ship Dump

These images were done early 2007. Mostly inspired by spaceship sci-fi illustrators, I wanted to try out a few of they're techniques to help generate art works for a subject matter that I haven't explored. Good learning's and fun all around.

Speed paint jams

While busy working on art works for clients and projects, it's such a nice break every now and then to have free for all sketching and digital painting sessions. Speed painting is a great exercise to speed up the painting process, being bold with brush strokes, and being light on your feet constantly changing the sketch as it progresses. When painting as an collaboration, it's even more fun! bouncing the image back and forth every couple of minutes to see what others and myself would add and change. All in all good ol' fun with Photoshop and a tablet.

Here are some that a good friend, Daryl Mandryk and myself have done in the past when we both worked at Propaganda Games. I'll continue to update when we jam some more.

Cartoon bits

A few sketches of cartoon bits for a friend of mine Justin in Toronto. On this assignment, I had the joy of coming up with different art directions/styles for the show, allowing myself to freely construct images in a few different looks that felt appropriate for the objective. Most of these I remember where done late at night after Adelaide was fast asleep.

Life drawings from college

Found some life drawings from Sheridan and studies done shortly after getting settled in from moving to Vancouver. Kept as part of an older portfolio I showed when interviewing for digital animation at VFS.

SSX On Tour

SSX on Tour was probaly the most fun I've had on a project to date. Their art team asked me to help give the presentation of the product a hand with art works that resembled a high school rocker wannabe glam shredder!

My friend Rich Curren was the art director responsible for pushing such a daring flavor to this franchise and to the gaming world. Like it or not, we all went for it!
Now we got to remember that at the time when this product came out, there was nothing like it yet towards presentation in gaming. The loosely drawn day dreaming skart style was already an progressive art movement from skate artists, graffiti artists, and to do justice, my own personal voice and friends I grew up with, had not reached the malls yet.
Speaking of which, I actually got my friend Dennis Chow aka GLAM, a true school rocker with a knack for this type of artwork to jam with me and Rich!
I remember rifling off sketch book after sketch book packed with funny little doodles in all types of styles in wacky dispositions. Even took the time at the end to layout an art book for all the drawings!

Heres a few pages from that book.






Below is the intro movie for the game. Some how, I ended up doing all the drawings, poses, initial boards and provided any other 2D support to pull this off. Luckily the best video team I've worked with had a blast animating it all! Props go to Clint Jorgenson, Craig McKewin, Rich Curren, Mark Raham for putting this and the many many other movies together with their magic! We were known as the band. Now a days we're all so busy working on separate projects and places we barely see one another anymore. I guess we'll always have our memories!

Street Smart

While mostly solving production design problems with drawing and digital paintings these days, there's still the side of my resume where I once pursued the art of animation, both hand drawn and digital.

I'm not entirely sure where my student film from Sheridan college lives at this moment, might be tucked away at my mother's place somewhere? (If I find it I'll update)

However, I do have an digital copy of Street Smart, an animated short I made in 2002-2003 during my studies in digital animation at Vancouver Film School.

Below are a few concept sketches, production stills, and 3D model turn arounds that survived from the project.







The movie below is a story board reel used to time out my scenes and animation keys. I remember spending a good chunk of my time tweaking and figuring this out before any 3D animation was touched. Ultimately it made the 3D production a lot easier to manage and execute on with a solid plan done cheap with pencil and paper. No duh sort of speak :)





Ultimately, I ended up with a short film titled Street Smart after months of scratching my head trying to get the software problems solved on top of artistic issues. At the time, it was shown in the 2003 Hiroshima film festival for best student film! Was very flattered to say the least.
Here's the demo reel version that was packaged for employers. I ended up taking the first job I got offered and never got a chance to shop around. I sometimes wonder where I could have ended up if I kept my options opened and sent out demo reels. Regardless, I could'nt be any happier than I am today, working professionally doing what I love :)





Cheers to the VFS faculty and classmates for the experience, and a special thanks to William Bates, Paul Tanner, and Diego Bergia "the animation bandit" for getting me through towards the end of the project.

Sketchy skates

Here's a few pencil, pen and digital sketches dug out from a skate project from 2004.
When looking back here, the design inspirations, completely prejudice and guilty of it, crept into these sketches. Lots of fun and enthusiasm to be simply allowed to experiment with all sorts of looks before an art direction was authorized.

Pirates

Here's a few pirate sketches done a couple years back.
I remember truly having fun with these back then, embraced different Photoshop rendering techniques to accommodate the subject matter the best I could.

Quick excercise

I gave myself an quick exercise in breaking down an existing design with a broad problem statement to come up with something ownable that is still related to it's origin.







1st Sketch is usually the most generic, but needed to get it put down on paper and out of my system.
2nd and 3rd started to abstract from it's source quite dramatically, becoming more playful and stylized with personality peeking through.
By the 4th sketch, I felt it was so far removed from the original reference that it became its own identity, within a thin line; retaining the believability of an automobile.
Keeping in mind, the renders were picked out from a few pages of thumbnail sketches, one take at a time.

Overall, I was pleased with the quick exercise and had fun!

I wonder what their world is like? The characters that live in that world? Starting to fantasize about it......

Oh by the way! I love Subaru Impreza's! :)

Blast from the past

Originally posted in an older blog where I separated personal works with industry related works. Ultimately, with encouragement, I'm deciding to have it all in one blog rather than two.

The following sketches were done when inspiration and motivation was flowing, found myself always in my sketchbooks doodling.

Drawings from the wonderful pages of lovelydesign journey books.

Sketchbook center page from yet another lovelydesign book.

Ink and watercolor sketches in the park and off a beach in a small town British Columbia.

A collection of a few oil pastels on cardboard. These were created to be showcased in an group art show in Germany at the time.

Billy, Freddie, and George at the top are 18x24 charcoal sketches and the bottom image is a pen drawing that I played around with in Photoshop. These were both showcased in a book "Sketchbook Black and White" and was later shown at a local art show.

Paper, ink, and Photoshop was used to create these images. These were shown in a book "Cats and Dogs" and the city scape image was shown at a local art show.

City Sketches from the sketchbook that somehow made into Photoshop. The top image was sketched on Robson Street in Vancouver when I first arrived in the city just after school. The bottom image is from studies for a friend's skateboard design.

These two were done for an book and art show called 8-bit. They asked for a take on a old school video game, and this is what I handed to them. These now live in a home in Vancouver.

Character sketches

Here's a few random character sketches all done at separate times.
Learning and experimenting with different rendering executions and plain good Ol' sketchy fun during Photoshop painting demos for students, friends, and co-workers.

My favorite exercise

My favorite exercise!

Ever since my times at Sheridan college, I remember how much life drawing was a key component in my life. Going 5-6 times a week! sometimes even more during portfolio grading deadlines during school, hoping for a keeper here and there while conning myself not to care.
I kept the life drawing up 2 sessions a week when I first moved to Vancouver and slowly tappered into once a week when time got more scarce.

Now a days, I'll love to find time to keep the drawing up, been challenging since adjusting to parenthood. But I wouldn't miss Adelaide's baby year's for anything :)
Perhaps it's time to blow the dust off my charcoal case, flex that muscle again, and making marks for no one but myself for a bit of exhale from the reality of working in a production studio.


These gestures are dated from a few sessions in winter 2005

Turok

Here's a few production sketches from the game Turok I slipped in a couple years back.
Did not get much of chance to get involved with this project for I was dedicated to another at the time, but was always down to lend a hand during slower times at work and jam with my co-workers who were setting the production design for this project.

Shouts to Micheal McCartie, Chad Smith, and Daryl Mandryk! These guys made my time at Propaganda Games one of the greatest experiences of working in the field with other concept artist's locked in a room, while listening to the Conan soundtrack on repeat and attacking each other with outlandish caricatures :)

Resorted to Drawing

Found a few odds and ends from a few years back.

The days when everything I worked on started with pen to paper, and rendering in Photoshop slightly with out confidence.

Always been connected to drawing due to classical animation back in school days. So when digital painting was first introduced, I did not know what the heck to do with it. Always found myself resorting back to a drawing/sketch to hold the image together. What's telling is the style creeping in to the sketches back then.

Fun times :)

Need for Speed

The most recent shipped game I helped work on just released, Need for Speed Undercover. This title being my first full production cycle working as a concept artist at EA in years, while previously only being involved in pre-production or pitch phases of ideas/New IP.
The experience was definitely an eye opener to what goes down during a NFS production cycle.
Much props to the art hero's I worked with on this team, Alan Jarvie, Rose, and our fearless leader Dave Taylor.

Here's a Art dump of some of the many concept sketches I've provided during this production. I used mixed media in Photoshop to best execute for this type of product. Photo stitching and paint over, ultimately allowing anywhere between 2-6 hours from thumbnail to completion.

Anyhow, here's the images! :)

Coffee shop sketches

Here's a batch I've kept from Christmas vacation 2006.
At the time, I just finished a project at Propaganda Games/Buena Vista Games and had a line of sight of possibly moving on to help work with a friend's proposal for an up coming project. Therefore I wanted to create a few new sketches that I could show along with whatever I had as a portfolio.
Since I was on holidays, I spent my morning's sketching these up with a little help from Soma Cafe's strong americano's. Ahhhhhh I remember those days, my last of "much free time" before Adelaide was born a few weeks later :)








I did end up getting the job. Back at the Ol' EA mothership in Burnaby BC.