Is this what I want?

For the next several weeks I’ll probably just be rambling… and the things I type aren’t necessarily going to be truisms that I hold near and dear to my heart.  What I write is going to be what I’m thinking and feeling at the moment.  I’m contemplating a shift in my career goals and, as ever, this blog is going to be a outlet for me to organize my thoughts and analyse my work. 

Sketching is my first love…  It makes sense that I’d go into concept art.  But is that what I want?  In the process of thinking about rebranding myself I’ve started to think about the direction of my career, and I’ve started asking whether concept art is what I want to do full-time right now.  Ultimately I’d like to be a concept artist or creative director at an innovative development studio, but I have many options other than just concept art in the video game industry, perhaps I should explore them.  I’ve always had more of a knack for 3D over 2D anyway and in videogames (unlike my current industry) 3D is a more marketable skill.  So what to do?  Stay on the current path and maintain the determination to keep pushing forward?  Or acknowledge that I may be on the wrong track, and have the guts explore my other options?

PAX

PAX was fantastic this year.  A lot of games are coming out that I can’t wait to play (Fallout 3 Whoohoo!!) and it was nice to check those out.  There was really good energy in the exhibition hall, I went to some great panels (I went to some really bad panels as well…) and I got some signed artwork from some concept artists I really admire.   Most importantly, I realized that there is a MASSIVE number of people trying to get into the videogame industry. 

So I’ve decided that I need to rebrand myself to better represent my experience and professionalism, and I need to invest some time into updating my portfolio to match my current skill level.  I’ll be putting some thought into how best to go about that over the next couple weeks.  I’ll try to document the rebranding process on this blog, and if anyone has relevant advice on personal branding or has gone through the process of shifting over to the videogame market from the traditional gaming industry I’d love to hear from you.

…Some ballpoint sketches I did in my moleskine notebook during some of the panels…

     

    

Portraits!

Ok, I wanted to make a post but I don’t want to take time to scan in the sketches I did during PAX.  I’ll do a little write up-on Penny Arcade at some point this week, but I have a couple illustrators that need some finalized creature designs asap. So until later here are a bunch of generic species portraits that I did for Alpha Omega.