Tim makes art

The ramblings of an illustrator and game developer

Month: October 2013

  • Week 14

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    I can keep this one short. Monday I did my Off-stage thing. Tuesday I worked at Game Oven again, and played a solid run of DayZ with a friend. Wednesday I got well sick. Thursday I got to see a beautiful part of Amsterdam and worked from the dining room table in Adriaan’s house because he was also sick. We also played the Stanley Parable together, which is GOOD though ironically I think the demo is even better (which I played afterwards). And friday was spent under the covers until ‘sushi+drawing’ night with some good friends, where we painted crazy things on household objects.

    It’s fun to break out of established methods sometimes, I hardly ever draw anything on paper anymore, so taking a marker to a wooden box felt refreshingly visceral.

    I’ve been thinking more about my scifi game idea this week – tentatively named “Deck 5” – after reading this killer article about narrative design which anyone interested in game storytelling should read. It made a few things click together and finally gave me the outline for the plot. I’m doing early concept art for it now, more on that soon.

  • Imposters

    Today I want to talk a little more about something I touched on a few weeks ago, and I’m seeing it more and more now when I’m talking to people about their creativity. We can call it Imposter Syndrome.

    That is an actual clinical term, describing people who are ‘unable to internalize their accomplishments, despite external evidence of their competence.’ They remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. That sounds strange, but it is more common than you think.

    The first time I noticed it was when it was a running gag among cartoonists. We joked it was part of the job, and we didn’t really see it as a bad thing. It seemed like something everyone has to go through from time to time, this crippling fear about your work and career (especially if it is also your source of income). The idea was most clearly expressed by Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub in their daily podcast from way back in 2007 when they talked about being scared of the ‘Failure Police‘ – listen to the clip here.

    I always took solace in the idea, this shared burden that united us. But it wasn’t so much at the forefront of my thoughts until I heard Alec Baldwin’s interview with David Letterman on WYNC’s Here’s The Thing podcast earlier this year. Listen to the clip here, and tell me what you think that sounds like to you.

    Here are two very succesful people, famous, wealthy, loved, with a revered body of work, and they are just as scared of the Failure Police! It was like a lightning bolt to my brain. Clearly everbody creative struggles with this in some way or form. And you don’t have to look far to find more examples. In Indie Game The Movie we saw the creators of some of the best indie games of the recent years profess to feeling horribly insecure about whether or not their game was any good. For the dutch readers, HollandDoc did a great documentary related to this years ago called Alles Wat We Wilden. And last week Donald ‘Childish “Troy” Gambino’ Glover instagrammed a series of notes in which he said the following things:

    I’m afraid that this was all an accident.
    I’m afraid I’m here for nothing.

    I’m afraid my show will fail.
    I’m afraid people hate who I really am. I’m afraid I hate who I really am.
    I feel like I’m letting everyone down.
    I’m scared I’ll never reach my potential.
    I’m scared that sounds pretentious.

    I got really lost. But I can’t be lonely, cause we’re all here.

    Wa are all there.

    I don’t think it’s a bad thing per sé. It’s not a great thing, to feel like that as a human being, but I think eventually it helps you get better at what you do.

    And if you, right there, are someone who enjoyed the creative work of someone else, think about taking a minute or two to send them an email saying that. It means more than you think.

  • Week 13

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an independant creative.

    On Monday I set up a new Off-stage page for publishing as I do each week. This one I had already drawn a few weeks ago so I was done quickly. Which freed up the rest of my afternoon to have coffee with Charlotte van Grunsven, an up-and-coming game designer with whom it turns out I share a lot of views on design and inspiration.

    On tuesdaymorning I met up with blogger and new media specialist Anke Hans, who like me recently dove into the exciting and terrifying world of working for yourself. We shared tips and ideas and had a good laugh about the fact that neither of us is really making any money yet.
    Afterwards I started work on a project with Game Oven, and it was fun to hang out in their office and be part of a team, although I did miss my home office after a few days. Being in the Dutch Game Garden building also gave me an opportunity to catch up with my old internship collegues at Monkeybizniz, which may yield some new business in the near future aswell. All in all I think this was the first week I felt good and confident about my decision to go at it as an indie.

    Wednesdaynight me and Adriaan went to our usual wednesday evening event De Mus, a night of music, literature, film, thought-provoking art and fun at a tiny theatre in downtown Amsterdam. Our friend Joost van Dongen was there that night showing off his Cello Fortress project (uhmazing), which he works on next to his full-time job. Respect. We had a great night, and I hope more people come to check out this phenomenon in the future (although it’s doubtful if they’ll fit in the theatre!)

    The rest of the week I sketched some more Off-stage pages, played The Stanley Parable, Did some painting in the new Photoshop contender Mischief (which you can see below), resurrected my legendary character in DayZ, and over the weekend hung out with friends and saw Gravity (so good).

  • MIB

    Seeing Men In Black again recently I realized it is up there as one of my favorite movies. I was going to paint this frame but then I thought ‘no, where’s the challenge in that, let’s try something else – see if I can get these iconic faces down in as little shades as possible.’

    Arguably the earlier version where Tommy Lee Jones’s eyebrows were the only thing on his face was even more iconic, but with the extra shades it looks just a little bit nicer. Hardest part though was the shape of Will Smith’s three-quarter head.

  • Willie process

    Below is a little chart of the process on the Willie painting. When I paint realistically I don’t usually do a line sketch, I just go to town with big blobs of color. Well, in the cases of these moviestill paintings at least, since I already have the composition by looking at the framegrab, so no sketch is needed. I just sort of estimate the proportions and refine as I go along.

    On the right you can see the sweet detail that the Mischief vectors bring. You don’t have to set a canvas size or resolution, you just start painting and whatever size you need it as you enter in the export dialog and it takes care of it for you. Massive headache saver.

  • Willie

    I watched Die Hard 5 recently, and this scene captured my attention. I had to paint it, it has everything: rimlights, specular highlights, subsurface scattering, indirect global illumination, bruce willis…

    I didn’t do this one in Photoshop but in Mischief! Gabe from Penny Arcade pointed me to it, and it is pretty incredible.

    What you see below are vectors.

    That’s right. You can paint as if it were pixels, there are brushes with pressure sensitivity and opacity settings, but everything is infinitely zoomable. And the resulting file was only 300 kb! It’s lightweight, responsive, and only $65. It might be a few features and hotkeys away from bumping photoshop from the top spot for me in terms of painting. Check out the free trial to see for yourself.

    It will be really interesting to see where it goes.

  • Week 12

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an indie.

    Inked another Off-stage page on Monday. The one for next week has been in the can for a while, so maybe I can start building up that buffer this week! I also tinkered with the wordpress/comicpress back-end to iron out some weird kinks that have been in the site design for too long. WordPress is fun, there are so many knobs to dial and settings to mess with, but you have to know what you’re doing because she can be cold and unforgiving if you mess something up.

    On tuesday I went to have coffee with Adriaan and talk about his next project which I will have a role in defining the visual style. It’s a cool, ambitious and unique project – the sort of thing I like working on because it breaks out of the bounds of traditional games. And it’s nice to have a project with a paycheck lined up! I’m starting work on that this week. It’s also a nice opportunity to hang out at the Dutch Game Garden again, I’ve missed all those guys over there.

    On wednesday I compiled all the blogsposts I wrote about my adventures with Ralph in zombie survival game DayZ into a nice concise pdf that you can find here. I read through them after I linked someone who was just getting into DayZ, and I had one of those ‘man this is actually pretty good’ moments, combined with a sudden fear of the blog ever going offline and all that content being lost in the intertubes, so I spent the afternoon compiling and editing it. Everything looks nicer in Helvetica Neue.

    On thursday I finished some more mockups for Niels’ upcoming literary project. I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting lately with more abstract art styles, ditching the outlines, working with vectors. It doesn’t come naturally yet but I like what’s coming out so far. I’ve been neglecting my painting exercises lately (making the blog a bit of a barren waste aswell) so I want to get into those again this week.

    The rest of the week I honestly didn’t do too much. Felt a bit uninspired. Hung out with my roommates. Watched the torrential rain batter down. Finished GTA V.

  • Week 11

    This is a weekly recap of the goings-on in my professional life – to keep track of what I’m doing and to give you a peek at what it’s like being an indie.

    This is the first week where I felt like I am no longer incapable of sitting alone for days to just work. Right after I quit my office job I had a hard time sitting still and not going places and seeing people. It made me kind of homesick for being able to work comfortably in solitude. I think I’ve struck a good balance now where my days do not become monotonous, yet I can turn off my phone for a day or two and get down into it.

    Last saturday I swung by the INDIGO dutch games expo to meet up with some old friends and check out what everybody was up to. Every year they have some really cool indie games on the show floor, and talking and having beers with all the people afterwards reinvigorated my passion for game development. We also celebrated that my pals at Game Oven were awarded a sizeable grant by Gamefonds towards developing their next game.

    On Monday my friend Adriaan from Game Oven called me up and asked me to do the art for a small game based on Miley Cyrus. We talked before about doing some small, news-relevant games, and Adriaan found some guys who were thinking the same thing and had some money to throw at it to boot. It’s a very silly project but it had a very gamejam-y feeling which I liked, just coming up with things on the fly and polishing it later. We’re finishing the game up this week so I’ll be able to link to it soon.

    On tuesday I went to help some friends move. I had to be there at 8 AM, which meant getting up at 6:30. Crawling out of bed and jumping in the shower while it was still dark outside and then heading out into the cold gave me flashbacks of having an office job, and I felt so thankful that I don’t have to go through that every morning anymore. The knowledge that it was a one-off thing eventually made it quite enjoyable and I didn’t feel tired at all. My friends and I talked previously about how nice it would be to have one day a week for doing some manual labor in the open air. It puts you back in touch with the world.

    On wednesday I inked the Off-stage page that I couldn’t complete due to other projects on Monday.

    Thursdaymorning I met up with Anne Bras and Misja van Laatum (and Hessel van Hoorn in spirit) to discuss the revival of our graduation project Trusted Soil. We had built a demo and had big plans for the story and tech, but we never got around to it. Now that we all have some time to spare we decided to try and make it a full commerial game. Expect to hear more about that in the coming months.
    We met at The Park Plaza restaurant in Amsterdam, which is in the Victoria Hotel across from Central Station and a great place to sit quietly and work, so I stayed behind to do some writing for a bit. I considered going to the Unity meetup that evening but decided to hang out at home with friends.

    On friday I trekked down to The Hague to pay a visit to my old buddies at Paladin Studios. I distracted them from work for a few hours to see what they were up to and exchanged indie experiences with a freelance programmer who was also visiting. It’s cool to see their games all having a recognizeable unified style now. There are interesting things coming out of that studio real soon, keep an eye out.

    On saturday I did some more polishing for the Miley game, and made a few mockups for an interactive ebook app that Niels ‘t Hooft is developing.

  • Crosshatch

    There is art that makes me want to get better and there is art that makes me want to quit. Kent Barton skirts the line with his amazing crosshatching. I like to use the technique, but this guy.. so I gave it a shot, drawing a classy old man from memory. It’s way too messy, but it’s getting there.