Collaboration

At Avalanche, on rare occasion, a single concept artist will take a piece from start to finish. Most of the time though, we are bouncing concepts back and forth between multiple artists. This makes posting stuff or using it in your portfolio more difficult, but there's no question that it results in a better final product. The second artist so often sees things you don't, or brings in a sensibility or idea that modifies yours in interesting ways.

We did several big pieces early in the project for internal marketing purposes. Ben Simonsen and I worked back and forth on a couple of them.

Here's what Ben gave me to work with.

So I did this to it.

Then Ben took it back and turned it into this, which now has the proper tone we were going for.

This next one I started. After I worked on it a while I gave it to Ben and he changed the background to the racetrack in there now. Then we ran out of time and had to call it done.

I like the top image so much better, I'm thinking the moral of this story is to have Ben do the initial drawing whenever possible. But that's what is great about working collaboratively, other people make you look good and vice-versa.

Inifinity: Toy Box Enemies

These designs were for some generic enemies that people could spawn in the Toy Box. I think they ended up looking a bit different in the final game, but it was fun to work on them anyway.

Infinity Effects

I was asked early in the project to find a unifying style for the effects in Infinity. I wanted something stylized that would blur the line between effects that felt energetic and epic, and effects that felt small as a reminder that the characters were toys and not life-size. I know that's a strange juxtaposition but I thought it was worth trying for. I think they achieved this effect even better in the final game than I did here.

Infinity: "Designing" Davy Jones

Because most of the characters in Infinity were preexisting characters, our primary design goal was to bring them all into the same style while preserving what makes their character so interesting. This may sound simpler than designing the character in the first place, but it wasn't any easier. Sometimes it was harder. I think that on average, we went through just as many iterations on the character redesigns as you would with a new character. Some characters were particular challenges because of their detail and demeanor, and Davy Jones was one of these. How do you make a cute, cartoony toy still look intense and gritty?

Refinement of a design by Jason Kim

Painting over over a Jon Diesta drawing

Painting over the near-final model to figure out surface and detail

Classic Actress

We did an exercise at work where we had to design a classic actress. The point was to capture that certain type of charisma special to that era. We do these pretty fast; I think this was about an hour.