Another fish a day...

a fish a day...

just for fun!

Bad Hair Day

by the way...did you know that:
This first came into prominence in the language following its use in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Buffy (Kristy Swanson) to the one-armed vampire Amilyn (Paul Reubens):
"I'm fine but you're obviously having a bad hair day.".

GAMELAB part 2

this is a taste of what happened today in our graphic department. We'll be posting our findings very soon .

GAMELAB!

Very often we create outdoor scenes that involve trees. Trees are very easily overlooked or taken for granted though they really define a scene or a mood. Like in these beautiful paintings by A.J. Casson

Tomorrow we'll be having our monthly GameLab (where we try to develope our skills and knowledge) so that's what we'll be doing. Drawing and painting trees.
So check back tomorrow!

Wacom Move Over!

Today is a day to celebrate the arrival of our very first Cintiq! For the very few people that don't know it existed, it's basically a screen where you can draw on!
Our graphical department is very excited and can't stop working! It seems that quality and productivity increases with a factor 1.5.

By the way, the guy holding the pen is an actor...

HouseHold Fair

This translation probably isn't going to work, but I'll give it a try anyway...
Last years Household Fair in Amsterdam was a big succes! Especially for Emily's Taste Of Fame we had some artists on the stand drawing our customers as potential game characters in Emily's Taste Of Fame. Because people were very enthousiastic about it, we decided to do it again this year.

You can visit us in Hall 7. (Stand 07.517)
13-21 february in the amsterdam RAI.
See you there!

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want. - Mark Twain

For those people, we sometimes work the other way around. We create art that maybe, just maybe inspires people to come up with great gaming concepts!

Bad choices...

Sometimes we create concept art for projects that we unfortunately have to stop after a couple of weeks or sometimes even months. Here's an example of some concept art that our studio made for a game called TUPP.

The idea was that this scenery had to prove the concept of using backgrounds to show the progression from a 'good/positive' to 'evil/negative' environment.

Wanted!

When we are looking for new graphical artists (and we also do) we give them an assignment. It's the same challenge for everyone.

Picture this: It's 1937. A high class, english woman (in her thirties)is looking for her brother. He disappeared while flying a DC-10 over the amazon. When she finally finds the crashed plane, she finds that the plane is entirely empty. No brother, no crew and no world famous diamond.

The assignment is to create a filmposter, a dvd cover or a loading scene as we call it.

This story seems simple, but we present a little more information than needed, to see which choices people make and what they want to communicate. Just as important as their graphic skills.
We always add a compilation of artwork to show people what we are looking for and which variety of skillsets they are working with.

If you want to take on the assignment, don't hesitate to contact us!

A pastry a day keeps the doctor away

Or something like that.
Today is a great day! It has already been 2 years since we launched Pastry Passion. Because we had such a load of beautiful artwork and characters in that game, we decided 2 years ago to create "Pastry Passion - The Art Of". Just to show you we do excist on paper, here's proof!

Getting all emotional

Character development

So, how do you make sure that your audience sees the same character like the one you just created? The answer is easy. You don't.
Besides the easy ones like age, gender or even occupation, it's very hard to make sure that everyone can see if someone is assertive, shy or evil.
Ofcourse you can caricaturize characters but we didn't want to go there. We wanted them to be relatively real.

The most interesting outcome of the session was that the people we asked to describe the character, didn't say anything about the characters being smart or good with animals. Instead they imagined theirselves being that character. "I think he thinks that he's very smart, but his friends know he's not." And even this one: "This girl is from a relatively poor background and moved up on the social ladder. All by herself."