A Decade of This

I’m currently in New York City, and naturally met up with Mr Dave Gilbert for lunch, just to catch up and chat after over three years of not seeing each other in person. While we were chatting it occurred to me that it had been just over 10 years since Dave needed a new background artist for The Blackwell Epiphany, and asked if I’d be interested in the role. I’d done some animation work for Dave in the past, and some conceptual stuff, and I had reached a point doing low resolution adventure game graphics where I felt I could do a solid job of it. 

A little over a year later we had completed the game, finishing up the series, and I think we knew then that we shared a vision. While our tastes and our skills are quite different, they complement each other well, and we feed off each other’s creative energy well. Along the way Dave had promised that he’d have enough work to pay me a regular wage, and so I handed in my notice at my old job and have been drawing for him ever since.

A decade after that email asking whether I’d like to take a stab at the backgrounds, I’m still doing this, and it’s been a decade with many ups and downs, but it’s been a rich experience overall. Epiphany was an interesting game for both Dave and I, and I think that sense of a shared vision we established in making it is something that has endured.

For me the most intimidating aspect of the project at the very start was the question of whether I had an endurance to do all the backgrounds and animations for a game of such a size by myself. Looking back now, it’s funny that this was my main concern - that decade has, if nothing else, proved my endurance through a project to myself. As with all work I can’t help but feel that I’d change so many things were I do do this game over. I doubt that feeling will ever truly go away.

Regardless, there was a special moment when I had this first scene painted up, and characters in and animations playing - the falling snow, a taxi driving past in the background, and just the colours and lights all working together in the composition and I sat back and thought “Yes, this is going to be good.” It’s that sort of feeling that drives me, more than anything else, and after a decade of this, I’m still doing my best to bring that feeling to life with each scene, in each project, and that’s still the best part for me. I hope to keep doing it for a while still.

Starflight

Whenever I need a new mouse pad I like to take the nice cover art from an older game that I admire, give it a little edit in Photoshop as necessary and get my own custom one printed up. My trusty old Star Wars: Dark Forces mouse pad is getting a little shabby, so I decided it was time for a new one.

I like the cover art for all the Starflight games, including the wayward child of the series Protostar, and so I thought one of those covers would be a great option this time. My edits on this one involved painting out the Electronic Arts logo in the bottom right corner, and painting some extra space and planet on the left and right sides in order to have plenty of bleed space without having to zoom in more and leave out the nice details. 

It's a pretty loose edit job, and there's a few upscaling artifacts, but I was pretty confident that it would look totally natural once printed on a mouse pad, and it does. I've uploaded the file here just in case there's somehow another person out there who'd like their own Starflight mouse pad. Just keep in mind that the left and right inch of the piece are painted in by me after the fact and therefore it's not a 100% accurate version of the original painting.

Back to the Drawing Board

 

I've been doing a lot of end-of-year revising of my work lately - some of this is because I'm in the middle of Old Skies, and the middle of a project is where the sheen of a "new thing" has dissipated a little, and the job is largely production work rather than creative solving problems, some of it being because Nighthawks is going to soon be at the point where I need to go back and polish things, cast an eye over everything I've already done and fill in the missing pieces that we didn't know were missing, and I need to have my critical glasses on in order to polish that project up the way it deserves.

The tough part about this sort of revision is that usually with a few months of space between the creation of a piece of work I can see the flaws that I was happy to ignore at the time, and while this can be a little frustrating and also generates a need to quickly touch up endless amounts of work, it's also satisfying because it feels like this is the right mindset for growing & learning. I've got a couple of months of pretty hefty study planned to fill in some of my massive weak areas, especially after a year of pretty solid production work, and my brain has never felt more ready to tackle some specific elements of technique & knowledge that have intimidated me in the past. By the end of a study block like that I'm always absolutely ready to take a break from learning things and just get down to production, too, which is also a great thing.

For now, here's an old study piece I did a couple of years ago that I liked well enough to touch up just a tiny bit tonight. Been too long since I did this sort of thing. Thanks for all the support this year, and here's to a wonderful 2023 for us all.