Been digging through old hard drives this week..Think I need to get better about organizing. One of the big pitfalls to working digitally is things will invariably and up buried in some obscure folder within a folder on some old external hard drive, and its easy for stuff to get lost in the matrix. At the other end of the spectrum, you can end up with 20 copies of the same file from backing things up or transferring files from one comp to another.

After 20 something years, it ends up being a real mess. New years resolution: I’m finally gonna try to get my digital files bit more in order.

The first step is just gathering everything and thats what i’ve been up to past few weeks. Its been wild.

Thats why I decided to go ahead post up some random old jobs, some I barely remember working on. Which, by the way, has been weird as hell, because usually looking at an old piece jogs memories of where I was, what was happening in my life, and all kinds of random tidbits associated with the time period it was created in.

I think maybe all of the chaos that was usually happening simultaneously in the background is dampening some of that out. Maybe it’s the iterative nature of the work, or that jobs were often overlapping, or could just be that it was 15-20 years ago… I dunno. Its crazy some of these I look at and its like another person made them.  And in a way thats true.

Anyway, here we go, in no particular order with the best explanations I can come up with…

This was for Sega Japan. It was this crazy game with lots of demons and stuff. Was a lot of fun to work on. This was probably my favorite thing I did on it. Just like a fun, weird idea. Don’t think it ever got made.

I think this was for Snow-Blind studios…cant remember what it was for and barely remember working on it. I have so many images like this, a guy running away from or confronting some big scary thing…video games lol.

 

This was for army of two part two, or army of two squared. This was a shot of a back alley in Shanghai. Not much to say about this one really. Remember it being pretty smooth.

 

The was for SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES. Was an odd job where I started a few of them in oils which is something I’ve only dine a handful of times. Pretty sure this one was 100 digital tho. Wes painted that photo of the little girl on the floor.

 

This was a cover for PC gamer..i still have it in a box somewhere. It’s a photo of Canadian video game designer Chris Taylor, of dungeon siege fame. I modeled all the robot stuff in 3ds max, rendered it out, and composited it onto his face. Believe it or not, literally all of the robot parts are CGI and NOT actually part of his face.

 

INFAMOUS!! The box art for the game. Used the high res game model as the base for the figure, but while working on it, realized that my friend Gavin who I painted graffiti with was like a dead ringer for him, so I got him to come over to my house and shot a bunch of photos of him which were used to help flesh out the face.

 

Some thumbnails for something I have no memory of. Literally cant remember who this was for, but I think the bottom one got finished out. No idea where that final is.

The mysterious stranger! This was for one of the Fallout games. New Vegas maybe?

Absolutely no idea what this was for. Sometimes I like these little rough sketches the best.

 

TRANSFORMERS!! This was a take on an insecticon.

 

 

literally no idea what these are for but they made me laugh when I saw them

 

This was for fallout new Vegas too. These were pretty quick and dirty but I had fun on fallout.

 

Don’t remember who this was for, all I remember is this got approved first pass which was like mind blowing… Maybe I have shit luck, or just suck, but it so rare I’ll get something approved without the client wanting to at least change some little thing…so rare in fact that it’s the first thing that comes to mind looking at this almost 20 years later lol

 

This was for the golden compass video game. They needed a bunch of 11th hour cutscenes so drew a bunch of these over like a weekend I think it was.

This guy was for some Canadian video game company who’s name escapes me, that went out of business not too long after this was drawn.. Think I removed the mail/female when I submitted it…don’t completely remember the joke there.

Digging through all this makes you wonder how all this digital artwork is going to be archived for future generations. On the cloud?? It’s a different permanence problem from physical art. you don’t have to worry about the surface of the painting being damaged by the elements, but at the same time, whatever its stored on is arguably just as vulnerable.

Or does it even matter? Are we going to be so inundated by millions of AI images will anyone even care about this old digital artwork?

How are you guys storing your digital stuff?