That one Tumblr

Nintendo Consoles Through the Generations 

Had the idea of “what if I did models of the Nintendo consoles as if they were rendered on themselves?” and I did just that!

I plan on uploading timelapses of the process for each one. I have other timelapses on my youtube channel right now! Check it out, if you’d like!  

At this point I'm truly wondering what to do, really. (Glaze your art and so on, sure) But even the words we write, our personal thoughts, asks, everything is getting fed into these fucking machines from any site available. "Make your own page!" - Services like Squarespace, which are what I and most of my peers use, have sneakily added the option to allow third-party crawlers to harvest data. And portfolio websites are not social media. I want to interact and I have to reach clients.

Are we reaching the point where we have to post only previews and send finished art via Newsletters or post behind paywalls? Print it out and send a pigeon to our followers' homes?

I'm so fucking tired. So angry.

I've been an artist through life-threatening depression, through working and studying full time, through moving house and country, through the pandemic.

Especially the point about portfolio sites not being social media. I post to twitter because that's where my professional peers are. It's where you can get approached by potential clients or collaborators. I post to tumblr because it's where my fandom peers live, where I can facilitate a gallery with a semblance of an archival and tagging system, where I've posted my art for over a decade.

If I just wanted to post art with no interaction and no feedback, I could probably do that pretty easily. But that's not why I share my art online.

The continued hostility, commodification and devaluation of artists online is making a lot of us question why we even bother anymore. Platforms that were made successful on the backs of artists are all suddenly turning on their core userbase in order to turn a profit. Like, I get it, websites have to make money and if you don't pay for the product, you are the product, yadda yadda yadda. But I gotta assume there are ventures they could explore other than wholesale theft of their userbase's copyrighted content.

And they all handwave it away by pointing to the TOS as if anyone could've known that by signing a standard agreement to have your content hosted on the site sometime in like fucking 2010 for some of us, you'd be agreeing to having your data scraped by third parties years and years down the line. And I get that TOS can change, but tumblr has no way to effectively purge your content from the platform (that I know of), so it's not like you can do much about it if you've been posting here for a decade.

I’d kill to find a place that captures the magic of posting art on deviantART in the 2010s, but there are so few sites that exist like that anymore. A few have popped up, like inkblot and artfol, but nothing catches.

awesome, so instead of a reprint like he was considering, joe murray's decided to just release his book as a free pdf/ebook!

i had a lot of trouble getting my hands on a copy (and i got extremely lucky to only pay $80 instead of the $200-$300 it usually goes for!) so this is awesome ❤

(This was originally a twitter thread I wrote before the site self imolated, hense it's strange structure.) I wrote this after a weekend of portfolio reviews - 1. Like a maths exam, please please show your working. I want to see thumbs options, mid options and of course a final design.

2. Arrange your portfolio, I don't want to bounce about between subject matter and pipeline. Your portfolio's narrative should be as strong as your work... 3. Please make worlds that excite the viewer, make them want to go in and explore them, explain to them the interesting parts of the town, or the way the character's hat unfolds. How will this draw the viewer in? 4. As I've said before the majority of your project work is explanatory not mood, make sure your portfolio contains explanatory work. Explained here -

5. A lot of beautiful post apocolyptic paintings, , but 80% of realistic games and film, we just give the environment artists photo ref, they are capable artists in their own right. Different work in stylised where you do need to create rules for how things can be translated. 6. Production art contains call out sheets, material references and flat graphics. This doesn't have to be your final image, but it should support it.

7. Design characters on a swatch(es) of the environment they will be viewed in. Not on white. I make swatch backgrounds from screenshots, it avoids assumptions that damage readability. 8. Reverse of this, put people in your environments, show me the scale.

9. It's not a deal breaker for a review, but if you intend to get a job, please show me your work on a screen larger than a smartphone (print outs probably the cheapest option with the best battery life). 10. Please have your contact details clearly visible, and by that I mean email address, I will not pass your social media contact on, I cannot input your form into my tracking system. EMAIL ADDRESS emblazoned and bake it in, sometimes recruiters do funky stuff to pdfs

11. Your portfolio will never feel done, not to you anyway. You will have learnt from your latest pieces and want to apply it to older work. But we know art is a journey. Send your portfolio anyway. I've been in the industry 10+ years and my portfolio is still not 'finished'. 12. If you are applying to an environment centric Concept Art position then please vary your times of day! Golden hour is cool but show me some happy sunny days, looming overcast days, what about at night? Vary your weather too! Sunny snowy day? Rainy Spring day? Stormy night?

13. If you are applying for a character centric Concept Art role then please ensure your portfolio shows a variety of body types and ethnicities. 14. Designing characters for games? Please show back views and feet (!) Many potfolios contain only front views. This is a problem because:

You haven't shown you are considering the design from all angles.

In many games rear view is the main view.

Stop cropping feet.

15. If you are entry / graduating and looking at Portfolios to compare content and standard of yr own work too, look at hired grad/junior artists as opposed to seniors Seniors and leads often have old or personal work in their portfolio which isnt representative of the day job. 16a. Show clearly the intended use case for your Concept Art. Mention the game type in the description. Are these player character designs for a 3rd person adventure game? Then more back views please. Bonus points for diagetic ways of showing health / equipment / role etc.

16b. Are these designs for an FPS? Then really the player view of the gun needs to sell the player style/ choices, in an FPS your weapons are almost your character. Are these world designs? What's the view distance? For an RTS your shapes need to read from above & a distance. 16c. The lack of clarification means I am judging the design in isolation, which both harms the design (you might be considering the backview of a char as the main adventure character.) Or an NPC, their waist up expressions may be important for conveying exposition and mechanics.

16d. Concept art is not separate from gameplay, great concept art serves the game team before it is a good illustration.

17. Play games. A variety of games. Think about them. IMO to be a good concept artist you need to understand the common language & references used by your peers. Also understand the principles and common language your audience are used to. FPS design rules are v.diff from RTS.

A drawing of my dragonborn paladin of Bahamut, Nova'kīn Orn Molik Malsvir Losvir Rakshasterra, brother of the silver skin and bane of evil’s terror. The sacred shield, divine defender, and paladin of the people.

I originally ran this character several years ago in D&D 3.5e on a short adventure, but he has grown immensely as a character over the years, and I wanted to tell a better story with him. The style of dragonborn is based off of my favorite version; in 3.5 dragonborn were not merely a race that may or may not have connections to true dragons. It was an ascension. Chosen by the draconic gods and offered rebirth in order to better defend the realms from the tyranny of Tiamat and her followers.

Lil’ fanart of the most shovel of the knights!