Hi everyone. My name is Philip Herman and I was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. Currently I work in Singapore and have been here since 2005. I've been working in the games industry as a 3D character modeler for six years, and my primary areas of work are modeling and texturing.
I see you're a self-taught artist – can you tell us how you became involved in the field of CG, and has it all been hard work until now?
Since childhood, I've always been fascinated by Disney cartoons, video games, and manga. I dreamt of being involved in such projects. After I graduated from high school, we didn't have any colleges specializing in CG at that time here in Indonesia, so I went to take up graphic design. However, my passion for games and animation was always there, so when I was in college, I taught myself by buying some books with 3D tutorials in them, and found some CG tutorials on the internet. After I graduated, I just created my personal portfolio at home and tried to get a job in a CG company. It was a lot of hard work, but it paid off when I got an offer from a games company in Singapore that saw my artwork in a local CG forum.
Recognizing your enthusiastic spirit as an artist I feel you must spend a lot of your free time doing personal projects. Can you manage without working late into the nights?
I always think, "If you want to be better than others, you need to work harder than others”. I feel I will not improve if I don't use my time to learn and try new things. There are lots of great artists out there that motivate me and there's always room to improve... I need to work hard to achieve my dream.
About working late, I think it's just part of being an artist. To me late nights are not really an issue; it's more about how passionate you are about art and to what extent or level you want to push it. I know there are some talented artists that can work very quickly, but I sometimes still work late. It's very rare for me to be asleep earlier than midnight when I am working on a personal project.
Any problems going from one character/project to the next one, in terms of the ideas that made the previous one work? If so what's your way of starting from scratch and producing recognizable and unique masterpieces without "looking back”?
I treat each project as a new challenge. I prefer not to limit myself to any particular visual style; instead I like to try and discover new styles. Existing works are the ideas and expressions of others, so by referring to them I can develop, formulate and express my own unique ideas. At the moment, I prefer to make characters that have strong characteristics or expressions, just like characters from Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, etc., which I try to learn and study from.
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