I had this idea of creating this cool sci-fi style landscape where people in crazy suits built video game landscapes one pixel at a time.  They would have these cool pixel filled backpacks that would filter to a gun where they would fire pixels into shapes.  Kind of like the the slime proton packs in Ghostbuster 2.  So I felt it’d be a great opportunity to display some of my digital painting skills I had been cultivating on other projects.

I did the below sketch of the cover, the client liked it  and all was right with the world.

Initial concept sketch.

Concept sketch for the characters’ suits.

But when I went worked this sketch further it looked terrible.   There was too much detail, not enough focus.  I tried a bunch of stuff and it all looked terrible.   The biggest concern was it looked busy and there wasn’t type on top of it yet. I naturally want to make most illustrations have a narrative focus. However I forgot that Magazine covers should be more of a hero shot with a singular focus with room for article titles and what not.   The busy “narrative” cover can be made to work…however on this project i couldn’t get there.

So I did something I never do on projects.  With a week left I threw away the abomination I was working on and started over. I stayed up all night recomposing the concept into more of a hero shot with a giant character manipulating pixels.  It is a  big gamble ( and a bad idea) to pull this kind of a switcheroo on a client and thankfully the people at Game Dave Mag were super supportive.
However I felt strongly that the illustration needed to go a different way.  Also when I went to redraw the composition the hero drawing came together really fast.  If you try and force out a drawing people can usually tell ( at least subconsciously). So if a drawing happens with ease I find it gets a more pleasing response. With that in mind I decided to go for it.

Below was the image I sent to them (along with a long apologetic explanation).

I used renders from he free program Google Sketch-UP for the pixels and little islands.  I assembled a bunch of them than exported them into Photoshop for digital painting passes.
Below is the final cover without magazine elements.

Usually I am an obnoxious ass when it comes to self promotion.  However, I have kept this illustration under my hat for a while.  I really liked the way it came out, and it’s one of my more finished digital pieces. But it doesn’t fit into my usual illustration work.  I think my biggest problem as an illustrator is that I like to jump around stylistically.    This works when doing web projects or even concept work, where different approaches are needed.   However my illustration work suffers a bit from shifting styles. If you held Winterbottom up to this you wouldn’t know this was me.   Even friends who have known my work for years had no idea I did this. Although I kind of like that reaction, it isn’t doing me any favors in brand identification.

So I guess I felt this was too much of a jump to cram down people’s throats via my website. However a friend of mine sent me this yesterday from GDC so I figured it was a good time to talk about it.

They are all staring into my soul wondering why I ignored them.

Looking back it reminds me of Minecraft creations. If I had done it later I might have pushed the pixels into shapes aspect more.
It was a great learning experience to say the least and I am happy Game Dev magazine gave me the opportunity.

A sampling of the many images Victoria delivered to me.

I did all this to kick off a series of posts that will featured selections from my sketchbooks.  I am going to shoot for pulling images from one book per post.  There is  no time-line for this series really, but it struck me as a goodway  to update the site when I have nothing to say or plug.  Check back in the near future( where we will ride rocketships and the internet will send data to your brain)  for updates.

This post contains entries from two books: The first set are from  a Black Moleskine( 5” x 8 ¼”) and the other is a Muse Touch Landscape (w/ Water Color Paper)  . I am terrible at dating my sketch pages but by I recall these were all completed from 2008-2009.

Spooky dude first sketched as an intro page and later became a painting.

Paulette Goddard

Chickens in Taiwan.

Caricature of Stephanie and a goblin she speaks too…I dunno

Another Chicken different style same great taste.

This should be in the Winterbottom page actually. As these were my first Drawings of the big boss evil Chronoberry Pie that taunts PBW in the game.

Stephanie Fishing

When in doubt I draw crocodiles/alligators.

Masks in my room, for real.

See what I mean.

-end-

Here is the sketch for the recently added painting: The Claw

As the title suggests I am trying to play with the different displays of emotion . I really wanted to convey the horror in the monster’s face and the unbridled joy in the girls. I am having a lot of fun with this new series of paintings and am trying to push myself to show much more dynamic reactions from characters.

A good friend of mine is obsessed with these machines. I am sure in the secret underground world of stuffed animals she is viewed as some kind of menace. Snatching poor souls from their plexi-glass support center, like the Passover ghost. I swear I once saw a machine with a red x painted on it’s mantle and she quietly muttered “ Not this one….”

Speaking about the process as an artist seems like it might come off as horribly self-indulgent. Of course I think it is interesting… but does anyone else? It’s a good thing my apprehension is smaller than my ego I suppose. So here goes:

I used to have a painstaking process for composing a picture. I would work out thumbnails, than draw a fully finished sketch. This drawing was worked out on various sheets of tracing paper, where I painstakingly refined the drawing up from loose sketchy line work. Than I would produce a final polished drawing on one solid tracing sheet. After the drawing was done I would transferred it to water color paper (involving a whole other agonizing process) then Ink the drawing before coloring. I would have ground the paper into pulp myself and harvested the trees from the soil of mother earth herself too, if only I had the chance…

Suffice it to say, this process was really dumb.

The result was I ended up redrawing the same image at least three times, which made it very hard to not make the final look stiff and forced. It also took forever and was totally unnecessary. I have since streamlined my process. I still like to start a drawing really rough and then refine the drawing over multiple sheets but now I use animation paper

That stuff is so great! It not only has a good tooth but it is also translucent. When I get a drawing to this point where I can start nailing things down I use a light box to transfer the image to my final working surface. I used to work on the thickest water color paper possible, 300lb ! This stuff was tough, and you had to use a diamond tipped ban saw to cut it. It would never curl from the paint, but the transfer process was so ridiculous I had to abandon using it for “planned-out” illustrations. Now that I am better at managing the paint I can work on 140lb sheets with out it wrinkling and I can light box the drawing through it’s thickness.

When transferring I solidify the last revisions and forms on the watercolor paper, rather than just painting by the numbers like I did before. I also don’t plot colors out anymore. I will just jump right into laying color down. This makes the process feel more like painting, rather than just going through the motions. Since doing this my finals have been much more confidant and much more fun to paint (which I think shows in the work.) It also makes trying to show emotion easier as it feels fresh and less labored.

I am really happy with how the colors came out in this one, and in general I feel great about my new work. With the free time I get from a streamlined process I liberate stuffed animals and extradite them back home to claw machines…but that is a different story.

That’s all for now,
Vincent

That was really tough for me. I am such a blabber mouth that when I finish something I want everyone to know about it. So for that time although I am proud of the work I did for Disney, I felt mute and couldn’t really perform well on my own work.

However, I thought of a ton of ideas in that moment, but due to time, fatigue or expended creative juices I couldn’t work on them. So now that I am freelancing I am making up for lost time. Right from the start my goal was to develop a whole new collection of paintings. These would be to show off my current skills, for future exhibition and really just because I could.

I am happy with my older work, but after a while it becomes just that, and it’s unfair to expect anyone to give a damn about the same set of paintings they have already seen. Plus I had gotten better since my old standards, and the direction I want my work to go in has become clearer.

My current goal is to complete a full set of ten or more paintings in the whimsical storybook style I have used for the Piñata and Tree paintings. Than I will exhibit them somewhere or collect them in some fashion I’m sure, however I am not worried about the end result for the time being.

Each painting will use the children’s book cliché of having a character discover a world they have never known. However each painting will try and deal with more mature themes, like violence in the piñata piece or unfamiliarity in the tree piece.
Attached above is the built out sketch for the recently added tree painting. I had the idea a while ago, but sometimes I like to let an idea bake in my head for a bit before doing it. However when the idea originally came to me I did a mini painting of it that was posted on the old blog. Here it is again:

It is funny because I started building this sketch out as a whole painting matching the composition almost exactly. However it just wasn’t working so half way finished with it I started over. The dark colored tone wasn’t right, plus this tree seemed so lonely being the only one to witness such an event. It also lacked the monotone to color relationship that happens in the final.

I hope you like it too, and really… thanks for listening.

Vincent