(pictures: all the projects I made during the MA that I could add to my portfolio)
And after this?
And so, to end with one last blogpost for this blog.Â
This last year was an incredible opportunity for me and I learned more than I ever thought I would. My goals at the beginning of the year were to become a proper junior character artist. At the beginning I knew this would be hard. My portfolio was not industry ready at all and there are very few junior character artist positions in the game industry. But creating characters is my passion, I could not let this chance go by to work for a full year on myself, becoming a better artist.Â
In the beginning I set a few goals:Â
¡        I wanted to be able to create realistic characters
¡        I wanted to learn Marvelous Designer for realistic clothing
¡        And I wanted to become better at designing character
I have been able to learn all of that and much more! At the beginning of the year I set a goal that I would be happy if I could get a job in the UK, either as a prop or character artist. I hoped for AAA-companies, but getting a full-time job was most important for me. Interestingly after putting the Cyborg from the Rewind brief online I began seeing that I was ready to enter the industry. While at the beginning I was fearing that I had to do a lo of job-hunting, from the deadline of the Cyborg companies started to contact me. This really surprised me as I never experienced something like that before. In the end I selected the company Frontier to work at. When I was there for a tour I loved the company. It was really catered towards giving juniors the best opportunities to grow to senior artists. It was also very nice that they have different themed projects, from realistic sci-fi, to cartoony games. As my portfolio has gotten quite diverse as well I like that I can possibly switch between games.
I would love to grow to a senior character artist here in the UK, as there are many possibilities with this number of companies. But once I reach that I want to go to America, working on my favorite games like The Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age. But that is still quite far away... My first day will be the 3rd of September 2018 at Frontier, starting as a Graduate Character Artist. And then we will see how I will progress.
Thank you for reading my process on my blog.
Marleen Vijgen
www.marleenvijgen.comÂ












