Art Discipline .17
Look for Your Own Way: Creating Art for Everdale
Nothing Beats Bathroom Breaks
This drop is about how doing things your way can actually be what gets you the job. Using the mobile game, Everdale, as an example of how weird art, personal taste, and favorite subjects (like buildings) ended up being exactly what Supercell needed.
During one of my first jobs in a Nickelodeon show, I had two great moments throughout the day:
A bowl of cereal.
Bathroom breaks that took a bit longer playing Supercell games.
What would you love to create but you’re avoiding?
At the time, I was working as a layout artist in animation, kind of boring. My dream was to be a concept artist in games.
One thing I really liked was environment concept art. I was doing backgrounds for animation already but I liked some weird vibes I wasn’t fully embracing, wasn’t listening to my inner voice.
Until the day I did, and created some weird buildings and props like these:
Just draw what you love
A year later, after a lot of work building my portfolio and putting artworks out there I got contacted for Valorant (talked about it in the previous newsletter) and then as that started I got another project as a concept artist.
In 2019 I got the opportunity to do concept art for Everdale, at that time Supercell’s next game. Working with Zombot Studio.
Turns out those weird concepts I was doing on my own got me somewhere.
I shared with you what turned my career around: stopped doing what I thought a concept artist’s portfolio should look like and started creating what felt right to me:
There are different weirder approaches I was taking towards environment and character design. In this project the environment part was very important, they needed to explore and try out stuff.
I focused on building designs, something during that time was one of my favourite things to draw.
Art for Everdale
Here’s a case of one of the concepts I was developing )full project in my Artstation)
Here I explore the shape language, colors and materials for these Capitol buildings.
We were in an early exploration phase so you will see there’s some iteration on the shapes. Like this image, starting to create a modular system:
The main shapes I was using in the beginning were looking too primitive so we checked some real buildings to mix a bit the shapes, breaking the big cubes. Also added some architectural details to show a different vibe for this since it was a campus/library.
Exploring again different building shapes and structure (with some notes I received):
Kept exploring these adding the base to integrate more with the environment and expand on some details:
Here are some notes from Supercell to keep pushing and mixing some of the concepts:
Last iteration before I had to jump to other concepts:
As you can see most of the time is an iteration on details and splitting hairs to nail the design. But getting the right shapes and colors is what makes the bigger difference when iterating.
Thanks for reading, see you soon <3
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Character Design Tutorial and Free Brushes here!
Good read and eye-protein, as always. Thank you Germán