——

In Where’s My Water?, players guide water through subterranean layers of earth, rock, and broken pipes, and into Swampy’s bathtub. The water in the game flows with life-like physics. Developed by the team behind JellyCar, the critically acclaimed squishy physics platform, Where’s My Water? features 80 levels of challenging puzzles, rich graphics, humorous effects, an original soundtrack, and a story that unfolds over time.

The band

My plan was to make a single illustration that would wrap around from the front to back. So the composition would have two reads and be split down the middle.   On the front of the CD would be the characters in hero shot poses and as you panned to the left (to the back of the packaging) you would see traffic jumbling behind them.   I wanted to try and make the traffic look crammed and illogical like the features of each mask.

It looked like this:

Before - Watercolor toned drawing

After - Digital Color pass

I did a full tone study using Windsor Newton Neutral Tone watercolor, that I planned on coloring digitally so I could have more control over revisions.   Everything was going great, except mid project the band changed directions and decided they didn’t want the characters on the cover.

That sort of thing happens sometimes, and it’s best to just go with the flow rather than kick up a huge fuss.  Luckily they really liked the city and traffic so they decided that I could use that as the cover, but I still had to come up with something for the back cover.

I really loved the masks, and selfishly just wanted to paint them as portraits since they were so engaging.  If your subject matter is compelling I think it is best to just get out of it’s way and not try and make things more complicated conceptually.  So while the switcheroo was happening I had already started my portraits of the masks.

I don’t get to do a whole ton of watercolor work these days so these were a real blast to paint.

Out of the whole project I was most happy with how the mask portraits came out.  It was nice being able to just focus on the execution of the painting rather than my usual concept heavy work.

There were five masks in total, so with them all completed and a long night of photoshop trickery I was able to put together the full cover and an Interior spread too.

Part of the project was to design them a logo and title treatment, but having my hands full with the illustrations I couldn’t focus on it.  So I ended up reaching out to my friend Diana Kwok for help on the logo design ( which she did a bang up job on like usual).

Front Cover

Back Cover

Interior Spread

What’s funny is that at the end of the day I think they went back to my original design with a different layout and also some added texture to Diana’s logo.

FInal Album Art

Again that happens sometimes, and in the end I got to paint some crazy looking masks ( so I can’t complain).

I am happy the band is doing well and let me contribute to their album, good luck Fellas! Follow their Tumblr

Big thanks to my cousin Andrew Perea for hooking me up with the band!

Some days you get emailed images of your T-Rex tattooed on a girls’ body.

I have gotten the “can I have the permission to get a tattoo of your drawing” a few times now. My response is always yes just send photos (which people never do) so I can brag about it.

I don’t normally do tattoo designs however I have made exceptions. Sometimes I have been paid for it( never got photos), other times people have offered to pay me( and I got way too busy to do it…sorry).

This dinosaur enthusiast just wanted to use a drawing I already had. This one I assume:

Which I made for a painting a few years back.

You never know what your artistic legacy will be. Second to Winterbottom I get the most response from this set of T-Rex drawings from my site.

I am happy people like it them so much, and that there is at least one person walking around with a T-Rex on their stomach (where it belongs).
Thanks for the pics Stephanie T. !

More photos:

“This Tattoo artist did an awesome job! ( don’t know his name yet but Kudos)”

” Kapow Sucka!”

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.

It is a beautiful magazine and I would highly recommend it. Their T-Shirt Club which is where they teamed up with a bunch of game designers to create one limited edition shirt each month. November is month two of this operation and features my design. You can purchase the shirt here, but get on it since it it is limited a limited run. I believe you can pre-order them now but they are available beginning 11/16/2010. They are definitely a day one perch. Don’t be caught at work, on a train, in a boat, nor during recess without one on your body.

Here is the image that made it onto the shirt.

A quick case study:

I was given the freedom to so just about anything as long as it felt like it came from The Odd Gentlemen and included the Kill Screen Logo. So ya know, Pipes and Tentacles how can you resist?
Actually according to the below scribbles the design was going to originally include some crows. At a point one would wear an aviator camp…I wasn’t really feeling it so that didn’t make it farther than these napkin drawings.

I then switched courses and started drawing tentacles. I only did this small scribble before moving onto the final. I imaged this cool dude sitting on the type and letting some of his limbs dangle off and on of the logo.

I got this far was satisfied with the idea and composition than said “F-it” and jumped into free handing the final drawing onto bristol paper. I am trying to work more this way now since it helps the final ink job feel more fresh and alive. I used to do drawing after drawing tightening and polishing an image before transferring it to paper be inked. But the result just ended up looking too stiff and too planned too many times. So now If i have a good idea and composition worked out I just get started on the final.

After the drawing was done I digitally colored the image

We actually went through a few different color choices before settling on this one. Here are a few other options:

That’s about that, it was a super fun project, it’s an awesome shirt and the kill Screen people are cool dudes.
Everything is right with the world apparently.

I have another little treat. You can buy the original line work drawing that was used on the shirt over at my Etsy store. I made the design using the old fashioned tools of pen, brush, and ink and then colored the whole deal digitally. It was drawn on 14″ x 17″ 300 Series Bristol Paper and is a beauty in my humble opinion.

Till later,

VP

GUERILLAS looks at the nature of war, the nature of man, and all the grey areas in between. It’s also an action-packed thrill-ride, full of jungle warfare and simian acrobatics.

This is the first solo project from writer/artist Brahm Revel.

Check out his work here

I was really excited that I got asked to contribute to the book.   It is a great read, beautifully illustrated and plays out more serious than the overall concept would suggest (definitely more serious than probably my pin up suggests.)  My favorite part of the book was the way Brahm illustrated the monkey fight scenes, so i tried to capture that in my own drawing.  Wild stuff!

Below was my pin up for the book.

Also in other Random Tidbits, I did some work on the Odd Gentlemen’s “Dueling Gentlemen” Game for Playstation home.   I designed the intro character Slap Happy Sam, who runs the Dueling stage you play on.

He only existed as 2D art but I had a blast designing him out.  Here are a few shots:

Slap Happy Sam

His Cameo that appears on the outside of the stage.

That’s all for now,

VP

It is a great exhibit this year and I am really honored to have been included.  It is totally nuts that a Winterbottom image is going to be exhibited next to work from Halo:Reach, Mass Effect, and the soon to be released Epic Mickey (which coincidentally I was actually really close to working on….but that is another story.) The Odd Gents and myself are really excited, congrats to all the other winners!  If you are at E3 this year check out the exhibit.

One of my favorite projects on the game was making “movie –style” posters to represent each of our game levels. Being inspired by silent films we wanted to introduce each game level with a new movie posters (to reinforce that they were their own bottled story as part of a larger serial) . This allowed me an opportunity to explore ways to iconically represent PBW in a variety of different situations; with color and in a style that could be different than the rest of the game art I generated for the project.  So it was great (and fitting) that one of these posters was chosen for the show.

“Savory Salutations” my winning entry in the 2010 Into The Pixel show

“Savory Salutations” was the first poster I did and set the tone for the rest of the series. The goal of each poster was to represent in an iconic way the main mechanic, or theme, of each level.   “Savory Salutations” had to stand for the first level of the game where you were introduced to: the main mechanic (cloning and time challenges), the locale (a crazy crammed city with a prominent clock tower) and the main character, (Winterbottom himself.)  I chose to make the imagery based on silhouette shapes to closely represent screen-printing or paper cut outs. Also the directness of a silhouette can carry a louder clearer message ( and it would not compete, but rather compliment the more rendered look of the rest of the game.)

Study your art history kids, it can win you acclaim!

The primary real world inspirations were vintage cabaret posters, Russian Avant-garde film posters, Saul Bass and generally all things Brecht or Dada. Some examples are below:

I loved the way these images could tell their own story using stylish graphic imagery.  Modern posters are typically floating heads or hero shots that are just letting you know which actors are in the picture.  However these vintage takes are so fun and vibrant ( alluding to the story while also being visually exciting as stand alone images).  We wanted to capture a nostalgic vibe with Winterbottom and using these posters as a springboard for our own helped us add to the games visual style.

More posters than you can shake a stick at!

To celebrate here is a selection of some of my favorite posters from the series of 10( which you can’t see if you don’t play the game and it’s bonus levels.)

In Clockwork capers levels you have to get all the pies in sequence and within a tough time limit.

In Baked Blue follies only Winterbottom Clones (colored blue) could grab victory pies.

Purloined Pastries had you trying to collect as many pies as you could in within a time limit.

The Trial was done as the intro poster for the games Demo. It was the last poster I did and had to introduce the general theme of the game to prospective buyers. So i focused on the seductive quality of the pie itself.

Spelunking for Sweets took place in these crazy sewers and although it involved red evil clones, I chose to focus more on the locale.  These levels were really a turning point for the in game art. The 3D guys hit it out of the park and ended up going back and reworking other levels to match what they did with this level.  I was so inspired by what the 3D guys did I wanted to capture some of that in the poster.  ( probably my favorite poster of the lot.)

Circular Conclusions was the final game level and story wise focused on PBW reflecting on his mischievous selfish actions, while also having to fight all his clones.

For those interested in such things: I would make all the image shapes and layout composition using vector shapes in photoshop.  I would work out the  on the finished composition color theme.  I then added paper texture and, where applicable, drop shadows and patterns to the colored shapes.  To finish them off I would add the type treatment for each.

I made small thumbnails for some of the designs, but I mainly jumped into the final image right away.  With most of them my first impulse for design and composition is what I ran with (which is what happens when you are under tight deadlines).  All the posters were made in a 3 month window ( in addition to working on all the games illustrated title cards).  To answer your question…yes I was a total wreck after….but I am much better now.

Also Check out Dave Kang’s badass Lego piece.   I met him at the panel  last night and his entry was really killer (Plus he is a cool dude to boot!)

That’s all kids!

-Vincent

The cover to the actual Issue (not my design, but a cool cover)

The only directive was “I need spooky stuff”.  Contrary to recent activity i don’t have a ton of “spooky” images.   Most are bright and cartoonish so I had to reach deep in my archives.

Here are the actual Spreads:

The illustration was originally a T-shirt design I was asked to make that never got produced.

There is a good story on this one, it was actually an old sketch I got to redo ( see below.)

They cropped my floating spooky dude for the final page. he was officially spooky

It has been a while since I have done magazine work so it was cool that I was offered the chance from a video game mag.  My worlds are colliding!

Revisitng an old idea.

I like the idea of going back and redrawing an old image. I like to see how I have grown as an artist, and what better way than to cover familiar territory.  However I try not to do this because you have to move forward, no sense in beating yourself over how you could have executed an idea better.  With this new project though, I got the opportunity to go back and play this exercise out.

About two years ago I laid this idea down in my sketchbook and colored it in Photoshop:

I liked this idea, but I was just getting into coloring images digitally.  Looking back it is really sloppy. The ghosts weren’t as well designed and the sillouettes of all of them could be stronger( too many details for a graphic piece). It was only really intended as a sketch for a more polished thing illustration.  However time gets away form us and the idea was shelved.

Skip ahead ,Skip Ahead.  When I was asked to submit “spooky” images to Game Dev. Mag I threw this one at them thinking I could finally polish it off.   Game Dev Mag really liked it but had no time to give me to tighten it up.  This whole assignment lasted 2 days and was a rush, which was why the were asking for existing work rather than seeking originals.

Well i couldn’t let this illustration out the door ( it being 2 years old and unfinished.)

Originally I asked for more time to do this and they said no (“Just send us the Hi-Res files we can work with it”).  I figured I could push an email response by two hours and that might give me enough time to fix it ( with the mission impossible music blaring behind me).  So I took it into photoshop and digitally recreated it in the span of 1.5 hours.

That’s right Mortimer an hour and a half.

I have gotten used to working fast, but this was madness ( in fact at the end of the process there was a big explosion i narrowly jumped away from).  This was an anomaly project, making fast shouldn’t be a mark of it’s quality( that is just gimmicky.) To be honest this was sitting in my head for 2 years i just needed an excuse to strike.  However I think it is a good example of working confidently and reactively, without getting hung up in the idea of a piece. I tend to be very in my head and overly process focused, so it was cool to have that striped away so I could just make something.

Funny how these things work out, I think this is one of my strongest pieces (and favored) to date and it happened in between emails.

till next time,

Vincent

Short Story: I began working on the game officially in October 2008.  As a precursor to this I had been doing illustrations to aid the game whenever I could.  A print design here; a T-shirt design there.   All the while bending the ear of Matt Korba and Paul Bellezza any chance I could( telling them my ideas for how to progress the game forward to the next level , visually speaking.)    After months of pestering and working for free, they got their deal with 2K worked out, and the stars aligned in my favor.   So in August ‘08 they asked me to come on board as their concept artist and illustrator ( a role which grew much larger than all three of us imagined at the time but that is for a later post).

I should also note that: All images contained are property of 2K Play and as such copyright 2002-2009 Take-Two interactive Software inc.

Step One:  PB gets a makeover.

The original game was built in flash and as such was heavy on vector art, with some 3d models sprinkled in.   Because of the new platform we transferred almost no art assets from the original to the new game.  We wanted to start fresh and make the game we always knew Winterbottom could be.  With this intent in mind our first task was redesigning the little pie thief.

We first started by  looking at the style differences between the way I drew him and the way he looked in game.  The Winterbottom character design was spectacular in theory; fat little body, big protruding  head and nose, gigantic hat, crazy mustache.  The design is versatile as long as those elements are represented ( this is true for characters like Mario, or Mickey Mouse… you can draw them in a variety of styles as long as the core design ques are there.)  Korba had hit on such a strong design early on, that our job was to improve it without loosing the charm.

PB Student Bottom -  he used to have high heels and no ears, but volume, volume, volume!

When I came on the scene and started drawing him I didn’t stick to what the student model was, but what the design could be.   It honestly took me a while to get my own version of him down, but what I was essentially trying to do early on was refine his shapes and build him a stronger silhouette.

PB Illustrated Bottom – All the elements are still there but I illustrated them differently with more focus for how they read as shapes

The biggest difference between the then 2D and 3D versions were the way the noses were shaped. In my drawings it was more of a triangle slopping down, but the game’s version had it protruding out like a rectangular platform( which wasn’t just a design choice since you can use his head as a platform.)

To work out how to combine  both versions; I started trying to paint him based off my 2D designs.  This gave me a sense of how the flat 2D shapes could translate to volume. It also helped show me what worked and didn’t about the way I drew him versus the student model.

PB Scary Bottom – I tried giving him more texture and “realism” by adding shading and folds under the eyes and terrifying, terrifying cheek bones.

After much drawing I settled on a direction. I drew this ortho for the 3D artists, but we felt although it had more polish, it lost that character the original had.

After this Korba went in and edited the drawing in Photoshop to reintroduce the long blocky wedge head( which I went in and polished up again in the drawing below).  This helped me wrap my brain around his face which had been a struggle,   everything in me was trying to rain the length of it it in to make things unified.  But the charm of the original was the disproportionate nature of his body.  After this my drawing style changed to accommodate this face and we had a direction for the 3D artists to follow( this model I would even refine in the way i drew him, good by triangle nose).

The model would get refined beyond this image but the below image was a test in post processing the PB model in Photoshop ( Like we did with the environments, but that process is detailed in the future a few paragraphs away).

Step Two: Environments

From the get go we had the challenge of making the world look like it had depth and clarity using only black and white.  In a game this is difficult since color helps denote distance and interactive elements,  and we only wanted tinted colors used at key points.    So our gray-scale had to be really solid for the game interactive assets to shine.

Here are a few quick tone studies in how to show mood and distance using gray-scale.

One of the things we wanted to capture with the game was that look of a set built on a sound-stage (the way they used to make movies in the silent film era).  We wanted certain things to look solid, where as  others would be clearly flat paintings with painted depth and shading.   The best example of this is George Milles “Trip to the moon”

Flat backdrop painting, Foreground pieces with “3D” elements.

More madness

Another inspiration was “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”. They would build sets but paint in extra shadows to increase the drama of the composition.

See right there to the right!

Crazy rooftops from Caligari.  The buildings force the composition, their forms twist and lean to it’s mighty whim.

We tried a number of things, but toyed mainly with combining 3D assets with 2D “painted” pieces in Photoshop.

In some early tests, I started painting a full flat background using animation vinyl on watercolor paper.   But the endeavor took too long and wasn’t editable enough for video game production.

This next series shows the evolution of how we would treat just about all of our game backgrounds.  The 3D artists had started putting together assets for buildings and the like, including the clock tower I designed( more on that later).   So we set up a scene in Maya and exported out the objects on three layers.   I then compiled these 3D chunks in Photoshop and painted in all the light, mist and shadowing.   The game runs in 2D, but by using 3D assets as our base for background assets we could make the visuals have greater depth and character.  By treating these assets as 2D post renderwe had more control over the shadows and lights we could paint in ( which is a trick we learned from German Expressionist films like “Dr. Caligri”).

In a nut shell this is the process used to make the game levels, however Matt Clausen the 3D Art Director on the game would go on to refine this process beyond my wildest expectations.

This next setting was epic, and it had to be as originally it was going to be the first meeting place for PBW and the Chronoberry pie. Originally that moment was supposed to take place in a dreary abandoned bakery.  The pie steam would lead you there and I had drawn out this sweet looking furnace.   Although the scene wasn’t ultimately used the spirit of it is there in the tutorial level.

More building assets – 3D models processed in Photoshop

The house of PB Winterbottom

Exterior of the abandon bakery which became the burning bakery.

An assortment of objects

Clocktower concepts.

We wanted the clock tower to be really unique as it would iconically be the most important building in the city, given the game’s time mechanic.   The main inspiration for it’s design were cuckoo clocks, since those things are so damn funny looking.

That’s all for now, I leave you  with a look inside the clock tower,

VP

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-