Blog: Resources

Yes Indeed!  Saturday night was a huge success. This little art studio (221 A Artist Run Studio East Georgia St.) held about 20 of us as Brennan Massicotte talked; it was low key, intimate and frickin awesome!

Brennan, being a seasoned duder from United Front Games hooked up some wonderful advice for us learning artists.  His area of focus is total concept art.  Concept, idea and function design – highest priority!

My favorite part of the conversation was his talk on Input VS Output.  He reminded us of how amazing people can render (noodle away) at Concept Art.org or Deviant Art yet the final product begs the question why?  What’s the function, story, or significance?  Does it matter if this design exists or not?  Indeed, this contrasting concept became clear as I redress my work towards high objectives while continuing related studies.

Personally an area for me to focus is considering a clear (not vivid) vision of what my created universes look like. Outlining the consistent limits and strengths of a design before beginning makes a lot of sense now.

Remember, “how cool” is always secondary to “the right idea”.

Talking with the local artists readdressed my process as we shared and compared.  I now see the different benefits and usages for going straight-ahead-painting vs design line drawing.  Sweet.

And by far, Brennan enlightened us more than most artists with his attention to study.  Image making has its place in process awareness but Brennan reminded us all to look not at “the image” but what is that you’re looking at?  Is it a green truck shape with a blue background or 4 wheels attached by suspension, drive train, engine etc and can you draw this?  That’s exciting! To successfully rotate a design visually is where it’s at.

Anyways, to further my rant of awesomeness, I took his words to heart on an immediate study in which I found a great statue shot on corbis.com and did a quick sketch for acquainting myself.  After, I imagined what the backside of the statue was and painted it. The creative design goodness continues!