My Influences as a Developer/ Artist (Week 2)

As a game development student I have drawn a lot of influence and inspiration from other creative individuals who have gained much success through their work in the industry and I just wanted to talk about a few that have influenced me the most that I am currently aware of. Before I became a huge RPG enthusiast I had an unhealthy obsession with platformers. The first game that really made me consider working as a video game artist as a child was Ratchet and Clank because of its beautiful colourful cartoon style art.

Although I did not know who I was gaining this inspiration from it was the genius of Dave Guertin, the character artist for insomniac games and the Ratchet and Clank series. I really enjoyed looking at the concept art that was available in the game and it really set my imagination flowing. I really loved that his designs seemingly had no limits which made me realize the freedom that artists may have when producing their work keeping me hooked on searching for a career as an artist.

A few years later I discovered a game called final fantasy X, I did not really know what final fantasy was  and I had never played a role playing game was before then. due to the fact that I did not have the internet till about 6 years later and I had no access to reviews of games I was required to look at the game case to determine whether I would like the game or not, and I was completely astonished when I viewed the beauty that Final Fantasy Contained. I knew that even if I did not enjoy the game I would definitely love the beautiful art style and character design.

Tetsuya Nomura, the lead designer and character artist was another individual who subtly influenced my work through his stunning detailed character design. At the time I did not realize that his character designs are over the top but I believe that’s what made them charming, the fact that they were over the top set them apart from what I considered the boring realistic character designs that were apparent in most other games during that time. This taught me about how to make my work stand out visually but I now understand that it’s not always possible to provide these types of character design for a game especially for games aiming to achieve a realistic style.

Much more recently I discovered the work of George Kamitani in the game known as Dragon Crown, I adored his beautiful hand drawn work despite how controversial some of it may be and I felt I was influenced by the fact that he took some generic fantasy characters and creatures and exaggerated them to the extent that they seem like they are completely new and unseen. As mostly everything has been done in this industry before this has inspired me to take a different approach to what other artists may do.

 These are the 3 main individuals that have influenced me in my path to becoming a Video Game Developer/ Artist that I can think of, please let me know who has influenced you or who you think I should look at.

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