The life of an indie game artist

I've been working full time at Sidebolt Studios for just over five months, now. We're almost done working on our most recent app called Viking Command. This has been a very interesting project!

It began as something simple: Just a little unit management game where you draw paths for specific sprites to follow to specific destinations. We settled on vikings (the original concept, I kid you not, was a joke about an entire game where vikings would fart their conversations instead of speaking). So I started painting backgrounds. Will, my coworker, designed and animated the characters.

We didn't really know what the tone of the game would be, so I started from Will's sketch:

 Then we decided to have all the units from the top-down perspective:

Then, one fateful meeting (that looked a lot like this),

We decided that, instead of each viking going to the barracks and disappearing, we should have each unit restock and head back out to war. Now we had to design an open port so the player could see each unit when it was finished restocking.

I was also trying to go with a more simple design, something clean and brightly colored. But after showing this piece off, my direction was clear: make it war torn, make it dimensional.

Now we were at week four of six expected to finish the project, and I had finished my first background of three. Two more weeks, two more backgrounds. That would have been fine, but that was not all… Each character on these maps had a very cartoony style: flat colors and hard-lined shapes. Everyone liked the new more realistic direction of the background, but now they wanted the characters to fit into it. The characters are cut into pieces so that they can animate. Some characters could have up to fifteen individual parts, and I was the one who was going to paint them.

The game, originally simple levels, ballooned into six levels, each with ten different challenges.

Thankfully, the higher ups decided to pull a few artists off of a different project to help me and Will. Here's a good example of the changes made to the style of the game throughout development. This is just the main menu! Keep in mind that most of these changes where made in the last weeks of development time:

 Finally, just for good measure, another level I painted for the game. Can you imagine this fitting in with the visual style I was trying to develop initially?

We'll be releasing the game within the next week or so. Until then, here's a teaser trailer.

Oh, and I'm still working for Shadowrun. Two of my favorite pieces are set to get published soon, I can't wait to show you. Until then, enjoy this lucky Ork from the recently published Shadowrun: Run and Gun.

Published in color!

I don't have much to say except I'm published in color now, so... booyah. I just recently finished some stuff I can't show, and I'm really close to finishing some stuff I can, so you'll get to see that all in due time. Until then, feel free to entertain yourself with these pretty pictures from Shadowrun: 5th edition.

Sparrow

Now I'll sit on her, see if I want to make changes before I send her into the wide, cruel world.

In the mean time, let's talk about her tattoos.

Since I wanted much of her character to be in the tattoos themselves, I tried working with one or two telling motifs. Her right arm starts off with a smoking knife and a banner. The banner says, 'hack' since she's an adept hacker. The skull, snake tail, and bone design moving into the grim reaper all follow the same idea: death. But the Reaper's coat is drawn away, and flowers burst from his ribcage. The verse below that is I Corinthians 15:26 "The last enemy to be destroyed is death."

Her right arm moves from death to life, while her left arm represents resurrection itself, what with spirit birds bursting from the dead sparrow's heart.

I originally wanted a much more cyborg-ish rogue, but I did my research, and adepts, though they have increased physical abilities, don't usually opt for cyborg parts since their abilities don't affect (and in many cases are hampered by) technology. So I had to go all-naturale.

UPDATE: Changes! :)

Operation: Look at Me

Welcome to the ground floor. I've been light on projects lately, so I'm starting to get proactive on the situation. I really liked working for Shadowrun. As I've covered in my previous posts, they liked me working for them, too. But like any child who knows that their parents love them, sometimes all they want is some attention.

'Look at me!' They scream, while doing anything on a spectrum from touching their nose with their tongue to climbing a tree while trying to juggle cats. The amount of attention they get is in direct correlation to the danger/impressiveness of their feat.

So I'm going to try and juggle some cats for Shadowrun.

My greatest strength is also my greatest weakness: I am a character artist. The faces/figures are crisp, clear, and individual, but the outfits are poorly thought out, lacking the required baubles and doodads that every post-magical-awakening badass should be fitted with. I struggle with the storytelling, not sure if I should go full leather chaps or 80's glam, and end up dropping a t-shirt and jeans on a bamf elven warrior. Even if they were Express Jeans, I should be doing better.

So I thought about it: I enjoy simple design. I like clarity of expression. But how do I get my cake and eat it? How do I tell a runner's story without chains and netting crisscrossing the frame like an S&M surplus store?

I looked through older (read: already published) Shadowrun illustrations, and I noticed another common theme: tattoos. Most of the tattoos are black tribals, which probably has more to do with their simplicity than a future cultural preference for frat boy tramp stamps. Don't get me wrong, they look cool and all, but for such a personal accouterment, you'd think there'd be more personality.

Which is why I did this sketch:

Meet Sparrow, the elven adept hacker. Adepts are runners that use magic to augment their abilities, rather than cast spells. Sparrow has augmented eyes, reflexes, speed, and stealth.

She also has one more important ingredient, badass-ness. After working on more than six illustrations with Shadowrun, it's the most important ingredient in every piece, and something I have to constantly remind myself of (lest my AD do it for me).

I was influenced by artists like Shawn Barber and Dan Dos Santos, who often let the skin of their subjects carry the narrative.

Now begins the hard part: painting an illustrated woman. I'll invariably have my share of stories on the process, but until then, make sure to introduce yourself. Just... don't make any sudden movements.

Shadowrun: Stormfront, Lesson 4

And now it is crunch time. I've produced three illustrations, I've learned plenty of lessons, but now I have little time for the last illustration. It was supposed to be about five magic users in a basement who delve into dark magic with deadly results. There's a bang! A nearby shadowrunner rushes to see what is wrong, his hands up to defend. A few weeks earlier, I had sent my AD this sketch:

I thought it was kind of cool, but I was unprepared for how not cool it was: I'm showing only people's backs, the perspective is truncated, and the illustration should be about the aftermath not the explosion. I had to start over. But instead of redrawing way back then, I started on the other projects. Fast forward three weeks: now I had two days, no thumbnail, and no direction. I hastily scribbled this and sent it away: How does this look?

I get nothing back.

One of the reoccurring issues I have is the definition of thumbnail. My AD wants to see basically the finished piece minus the detail and extra busy work. On my end, I'm throwing out mind pictures. They're like dreams. The space is undefined, the characters are vague, but the feel is there.

Since I work realistically, I try to get a thumbnail approved, then I take reference of models (me, most times) in the various poses, and then I fill in the thumbnail. Sometimes I find that what looked good in my head simply doesn't work physically in real life, and so the composition has to change to accomodate. Many times I've sent in a thumbnail and get critiques on proportions, etc, things that would be ironed out in the final. So it is my responsibility to put in enough effort to get 'most' everything right, so that my AD doesn't have to trust me not to send him a guy with a tiny hand or a scribble face. But this time, I didn't have that luxury.

I wanted to get this piece to him with a full day to spare, so that he could mull it over and send me the final revisions. That meant, since it was due on Thursday, that at 10 in the morning on Tuesday I had 24 hours to shoot reference and finish an illustration. I knew there was probably just a little bit of panic on his end, seeing the scribbles I sent him, but I drove forward anyways.

I sent a goodbye to my friends on Facebook, taped my living will to the door, and dove in, shooting reference, cobbling it together, changing the composition as I needed on the fly. I drank coffee, guzzled water, and took breaks every two or three hours to stretch and pretend that everything was okay. Sure enough, 20 hours later, I sent him this:

He loved it. I really liked it, too. It showed me that I could take what was a weak illustration and turn it into a strong one. It also showed me what I was capable of come crunch time. It also told me that I didn't want to repeat this performance. But it took less than two months before I not only repeated this performance, I trumped it with double the time. That's a story for another day.

Until then, thanks for reading, and join me next time on David's Journey's in Professional Illustration: How to find the ladder to succes, and what to do with the rungs when you're on it.

Shadowrun: Stormfront Lesson 3

This piece went smoothly as well. I figured out what I really needed early on with this piece, and that was a detailed thumbnail. Again, this is something they teach you in college, that the more time you spend on the foundation, the better your final will be, but for some reason I either forgot or chose to act smarter than my teachings. Regardless, this time I made sure to nail it down.

Here we have a Shadowrun secret agent in camouflage, sending information on troop movements in the forest. I was asked to fix just a few things, like size and distance, just so that she didn't look huge and she still looked hidden. Then I worked on the final.

I showed this piece to my friend who is in the army. He took a few minutes to take it in, nodded sagely, and said nothing. "What?" I said.

"Well, she's wearing a ghillie suit, but her head is uncovered!" he said, trying not to hurt my feelings.

But this is another one of those 'illustration as stage play' moments. The viewer doesn't want to see some anonymous fur suit sitting on a log, they want to see a real person, they want to see her reaction to the soldiers, how she's feeling. As my AD said when I asked what he liked about the piece: "the hot spy chick in the trees sold me!"

Final note: the girl I used as a model saw this painting and gasped. She said, "David, now I really want snake bites!" To her I say, do you really want to be a secret agent deep in the forest wearing a ghillie suit, too? I know I do.

Shadowrun: Stormfront, Lesson 2

Welcome to Lesson No. 2 out of 4 in my series on what I learned during the trials and tribulations of my recent commission. This lesson, oddly, is that sometimes you just got it right. Remember last time, when I learned not to show the character's backs to the viewer? Well, as Missy Elliot says, sometimes you gotta flip it and reverse it.

David! There's nothing but backs, here! You fell into the trap you just figured out how to climb out of! The key here, just as it was last time, is focus. I needed to have the priest as the focus, so he became a larger part of the whole. Here, I'm doing an illustration on 'some soldiers' using giant bug spirit monsters as target practice. Since the focus is the bugs, it becomes more about what the soldiers are doing, and less about who they are as individuals.

My AD loved this one from the get-go, and just told me to execute the finish (no pun intended). So here goes:

I think this one turned out to be his favorite, and it is one of my favorites, too. Atmospheric touches, like the sunlight glaring on the second shooter's hands and the sandy middle ground, as well as all the gross little details on the monsters, really came together almost effortlessly on this one. I wish every project were so easy. But then, we'd all be artists if this stuff were easy. Not to mention, I have no time to slow down! Two more to go, and I've already spent more time than I thought I would on these!

Stormfront: More Lessons to Learn

Another one of the books I worked on is available for purchase! I was asked to produce four(!) paintings for Shadowrun: Stormfront. You can see all the details here.

Each painting was a special sort of learning experience. So, over the next week, I'll take you on a journey fraught with ignorance and adventure, if adventure is defined as sitting at your computer.

Shadowrunners find sanctuary in Bogota. Oddly enough, this piece was one of the ones with the least amount of changes made to the thumbnail, but it still had a long way to go.

First, mentioned my AD, I was showing all of their backs. Second, the priest was supposed to be a badass, but not an aggressive one. Here, it looks like he just busted up a birthday party with his lack of remorse and a semi-automatic weapon. Finally, when this illustration goes to print, it will be 5.5x8. By giving so much space to the background, I have limited the focus on the characters, especially the priest, who is the real star of the painting.

So I pulled in the focus and redesigned the priest:

With the go-ahead, I got busy on the final. This is, in my opinion, the weakest of the bunch. That really comes down to being lazy with the thumbnail and not redesigning it when I had the chance. It still got the message across, and there are plenty of things I like about it: the shadow of the stained glass on the pillar, the textures of their various suits in the darkness, and the feeling of dimension in the architecture of the church.

The most important lesson (that I probably knew from college and promptly threw away) was that these illustrations are like a stage play: the audience needs to see the characters and be the center of the action, even if you have to fudge it. But, no time to reflect! I have three more paintings to do!

Running in the shadows

ALRIGHT! Finally, I get to show these little biddies. I'm working for Catalyst games on an RPG called Shadowrun. This is a futuristic world where dragons, elves, and all other fantasy creatures have been 'awakened' in our world. So you get all the fun, dark, mean future noir stuff alongside the elves and fairies. Think Johnny Mnemonic meets The Lord of the Rings. Okay, just kidding. Think Blade Runner versus Lord of the Rings.

These two sentences are a good example of my work on this project: Do it once, pretend I was joking, and then do it again. See, I'm not a big RPG player. I love film noir and science fiction, but I've never thrown a nine-sided die. So I'm doing double duty here, covering the ground I need to understand the universe it is set in, and then bring the artwork to life. It is something that even now I am struggling with, but it is fun for me, learning all these new things, even though my AD might be pulling his hair out.... :(

For example, I produced this thumbnail for a project about an assassin who is interrupted during an (what else?) assassination.

Easy, right? Except in this world, trolls are freakin' nine feet tall, the assassin looks wimpy and burnt out, and no security team would allow such a ridiculous breach that they would be inside the freaking building fighting each other. It is the future, remember David. So I got spanked and told to do it again.

Ah, now this one gets it. Yeah, I'm showing the assassin's back, but all the other elements are in order: noir city, political rally at sniper rifle range, and big ass troll. I'm sure the AD just looked to the heavens and prayed that I would be more of a nerd (in a good way).

But I had one better for him, this time, because I gave him this:

The file I uploaded is kinda small, but it's big enough that you get the picture. I'm pretty proud of this piece, and I think he finally sighed in relief.

Same goes for my other illustration. Here I was supposed to illustrate the beleaguered residents of a poor district. I mean sleeping in the streets poor. They had just been rounded up to vote by a runner, and he was showing them off to the election official. Think back to the beginning of this month, except with more dirt, a few elves, and less sour grapes with the result. I gave him this.

This has all the hardship and darkness of a Saturday morning cartoon. This is what Blade Runner would be if they just played Benny Hill the entire movie. I got spanked again, and told what we were really after. So I did this.

Much better, came the reply. A few changes were made, and I set about the final.

Look at that sexy leather jacket. I should put leather into, like, every painting. Just because it looks so cool.

So there you have it. These pieces are published! You can buy and download the book and play Shadowrun to your heart's content. Are you excited? I know I am.

These were a blast to do, and I hope you like them. At the end of the day, even when I got it wrong, the guy I was working with was both patient and encouraging. The more experience I get, the less patient he'll have to be! :) But until then, if I can be ignorant and put out some of my best work, I'll take it. After all, I'll always be ignorant of something. Stay tuned, there's plenty more coming!