On the bottom left corner of the color sheet, you'll see the block-out I started with, (provided by the World guys) It's what they do first to test the fun of the gameplay then it goes to us, concept artists for a visual pass.
When I first heard I was going to work on Cars II the video game, I have to be honest, I was not super excited! Cars is my least favorite movie in Pixar's history. So I was pleasantly surprise by how fun this project was. "Caryfing" environments and everything around was a real challenge and surprisingly enjoyable! Here is some concept I did for C.H.R.OM.E., the secret spy academy facility which was used for the main menu of the game. Big responsibility! I'm joining to this post the car research that went into it and a few explorations.
My band Searching for Celia made it to the Finals of Velour's Battle of the Bands in Provo. We are playing there tomorrow with 4 other amazing bands. You're all invited! It's going to be an awesome show!
We (the concept team here at Avalanche) started those morning exercises to stretch ourselves in the morning. We come up with a new topic every day:
First day: take the given landscape and apply a challenging color scheme of your choice. I choosd red and purple. I didn't know what to do with it after 20 min so I stopped there. :)
Second day: take a movie poster of your choice and recreate it using a stylized/graphic flat shapes style. That was a real stretch for me since it's so far away from my natural art inclination.
At the end of every project, when the need for concept slows down, we start helping out in other areas of the game. This time, I worked on U.I.(user interface), icons, load screens etc... It was a new experience for me.
This is one of those characters I thought was going to be easy to design but was not! We did sooo many versions of it! Here are two of the first versions I did:
Cheap action Figure version:
Collector Toy version (okay, I went a bit too far there, but it would have been fun to see him interact with Woody, no?! :) )
And the "Sid" version that we ended up with - version #200 (you can feel the frustration here! :) )
I like doing environments but I'm really not that good at it. I need some practice. Here are some concept and paintovers I did for the Sand box section of Toy Story 3. Our very talented renderers and world builders here at Avalanche made it look great in game.
That was a fun assignment! The goal: take the robot design at the start of Toy Story 2 (the scene where Buzz is in a video game)and revamp it to make it feel like it came from the Zurg toyline.
To summarize: I had to Zurgified a Zurg Minion! :)
Here is a piece that my friend Dave McClellan started. He painted the whole Haunted House (the building itself). Later on, the World Builders needed reference for the surroundings. That's where I came in. Those trees and tombstones were fun to paint!