a week on

Dear friends,

It’s been a week since I started my new job and luckily, since I have regular hours, work days and all that, I’m able to write another blog post to you all! A few updates before we begin; I put my shop back up. For the moment it features older stock because I haven’t had a chance in a long while (being in Japan and all that) but I hope to create some more new work. I will likely put up some of my sketches done while in Japan and I hope to create new stickers and felt brooches. I’m staying away from shrinky dink at the moment because it is pretty unreliable!

Anyway, today I just want to talk to you all about my new job, since I haven’t really elaborated on it very much. While I was in Japan I was very lucky to notice a job advertisement on facebook, for a 2d game artist. If you have been following my blog you might remember a while back I worked on some game dev projects with my friends. One of the people I worked with was part of this company that was advertising on facebook. I thought I’d give it a go. So now I’m here, in Wales, helping to design games for West Coast. It was a lucky break for me and I was fortunate to have already worked on a relevant project, which also gave me a bit of an idea of what to expect.

The company is actually working hard on a kickstarter project right now, to raise money to create a remake of the game D/Generation, originally released in 1991. You can have a look at videos/the demo/etc. here. 🙂

So, that’s what I’m doing. As I’ve said, I’ve been here only a week, so I wouldn’t say that I have much experience at all. But so far, if you’re interested (perhaps you want to do game art related things and are pretty inexperienced like I was/am?) I’ve spent my days doing tons of sketches and notes for an upcoming game here. It’s been pretty challenging for me as it’s involved drawing landscapes – something I always avoided – as well as buildings, other inanimate objects, character design, etc. For me, character design is probably the easiest thing out of those since, as you may know, I spend so much of my time drawing people.

At first I didn’t have a tablet to use so I focused on doing lots of pen drawing – no colour – on regular printer cartridge paper. But the other day I received my tablet, so now I’m working on creating some mockups and presentations of my designs using Photoshop. It feels very luxurious using Adobe CC, something I never thought I’d get to try out given its monthly fee 🙂

This afternoon I think I will finish up the character designs that I drew earlier on Photoshop, and I will try to convert some more of my paper sketches into fully coloured digital paintings/illustrations. It is really nice to take stuff from the sketches and to finally add colour to them…

I’m sorry that currently I don’t have any images to show, this is because I’m working on a new game and thus we are keeping things under wraps for now. Perhaps when things kick off a bit more for this particular game, I will be able to show and talk about the artwork.

If you’re hoping to see some new drawings and sketches still, you can have a look on my tumblr, where I’ve put my personal scribbles and bits.