Pixelated

Having grown up from the old NES days. I've always have fond memories of pixelated sprites. Super Mario, Contra, Mike Tyson's Punchout, Mario Kart... etc. There's just a certain kind of charm in these games that's not present in the current generation of entertainment. Perhaps it's nastalgia or a sign that I'm getting old. Either way, it's apparent that we're seeing a big revival of 8-bit culture. The biggest one being minecraft. Which recently had it's final release and sold almost 5 million copies already.

Why do people suddenly became interested in old school looking games in the past few years? I have many speculations and thoughts about that but we'll go over it another day.Save & Close

Amongst the many 8-bit products that came out through this trend, Swords & Sworcery from Super Brothers on the iOS platform really stood out to me. I really recommend anyone with an iphone or ipad to check this out. The game itself feels more like an art piece than a game. But every piece of art in the game is really polished and well designed.

* * * * * SPOILER ALERT from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery on Vimeo.

In the past couple weeks I've been experimenting with my own pixel art.  It's really fun to see how different designs can look with changing just a couple pixels. In fact, when you're working with a character that's only 26 pixel wide, It really forces you to think efficiently. I was focusing purely on silohuettes and color/shape relationships. Here are a couple experiments, can you spot who they are?

More robots!

Did these a while back, finally got a chance to post them. I really love the 2001 look, here's my take on a clean futuristic vision. The high res image in in my character portfolio.

Progressive Learning: How to become a Professional Artist in the Shortest amount of Time.

Looking back at when I first started to take interest in this field. I was always curious about how the masters became so good at what they're doing. When I was a student, most people that I came across, including instructors from Art Center constantly stressed the importance of "mileage". The concept of mileage is that one can only become proficient at what they do through a series of repetition. In other words, if you draw the same thing over and over again a thousand times you will eventually become good at what you do. I was a huge fan of mileage. So after I first learned the concept I was constantly doing more work hoping that it would eventually lead me to becoming a "master artist" as well.

Click to read more ...

Demo and such

I did a quick 90 minute demo at Kabam for my coworkers to show them my workflow and how I realize across ideas in a quick sketch. This is what came out of it :)

Afterwards I got really inspired and decided to get back to doing some more environment quick sketches before the hand starts rusting.

Back to the bay.

After 2 awesome years at Bungie I decided to it time for me move back to the bay area. I'm now working at Kabam, a social startup focusing on doing more serious games for facebook gamers. Social games is a really exciting space right now and I highly recommend artists to look into this space as it's a fast growing market that's innovating at a much higher pace than console games at this moment.

mean while, i be posting some art that's due long long ago!