Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Painting downstairs

Now that I have no studio to go to work, and with a home environment that is far too distracting during the day; I have been very very lucky to be offered to jam in solitude at my friend's place when they're gone during the day. This has been an awesome setup since I started settling in this week. The apartment is actually my neighbor's Susanna + Sebastian's right down stairs from mine. Traveling time to work is now about 20 secs, having lunch with the family is as easy as going up stairs, and the place is quiet and cozy with their two cats, Miso + Ming, keeping me company. So far so good!

That aside, based off the NDA situation with the artworks I've done the past year, it leaves me with nothing to post unless I sit down and generate new personal works. It's portfolio time for me as well, so the motivation is working out quite nicely. I merely want to take advantage of my free time before I start getting busy with client work again.

For this set:
I've been jamming on a set of images that I want to belong in one direction and universe. My objective is mainly to showcase how I would handle science fiction worlds.

Here's the first one from yesterday's sitting!



*I'll be updating this post as the images get finished, if all goes well, I'm aiming for one a day.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Leap of Faith

After a long tour of duty with my most recent project, I've decided to make a bold change in my life and give freelancing and contracting concept artworks a try.
A leap of faith to strive for a creative space and livelihood that I ultimately would like to obtain.

For now, I have lots to learn and experience with the business end. I’ve already got my first experience of what the waiting head space, finalizing contracts, scheduling to best help the one's who’ve shown support feels like. Something I’ll need to get used to for sure, time management, accounting, and all the other elements freshly discovered.

All of this simply stems back to my creative appetite to try a hand at different problem statements on the regular and allow time to mature my own artistic voice on the side. I had a set-up such as what I’m describing a few years ago, where I was part of a central concept art group for EA. I had many opportunities to touch different games with-in short time frames, always changing it up, keeping fresh. I really enjoyed it, and is what’s appealing in these next steps to constantly challenge myself.

The inexperienced side of my situation does make me feel honestly nervous about it all, being responsible for my family’s livelihood is quite heavy.
Luckily my lovely partner Shari and a few others from the industry have been very supportive of my decision, and it does ease my butterflies quite a bit.
If in fact I’m not suited for freelance work after trying it out, I’ll go back to working fulltime. But at least I would have gave it a good shot and gain that experience in life.