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3DTotal: Hey Jeff, thanks for agreeing to do this interview! Let’s start out with a bit of general background: where do you work, how did you get there and what makes you tick?
Jeffrey: I’ve always known I’ve only been good at one thing and that’s drawing/creating, so I’ve never really tried to shoot for any other career. My parents were both artists and were always encouraging me and my brother to draw on that awesome old printing paper; you know the kind with holes on the side? |
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In retrospect all I seemed to draw were war planes and tanks, probably because the Gulf War was going on or maybe it was just because my shy, quiet personality was harbouring violence and angst which would be released in embarrassing ways during my awkward ‘teens! I eventually made the jump to digital painting when I enrolled in the Emily Carr Institute after graduating high school. That’s where I met my graphite tablet - it was love at first sight. I’ve since divorced her for a sexy young Intuos though, good riddance! I studied animation, got my Bachelors of Media Arts and made a six minute animated film that I’m embarrassed to show.
I worked in Vancouver for a few years at a small games company, but last March I was lucky enough to get called up to Ubisoft Montreal where I'm working as a concept artist on some very exciting, amazing stuff that I am of course not allowed to talk about yet! I also do some freelance work here and there if the project interests me. |
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3DTotal: You often paint a character and then also another creature/spirit in the same picture. Can you tell us a little bit about this and the connections you are trying to achieve with these duos?
Jeffrey: I think there’s just a current trend going on with my “generation” (don’t know if that word applies in this case, thanks to the internet...) to pair up chicks with cute/awesome/bad-ass animals or creatures or robots. I could probably try to squeeze out a more thorough explanation about the appeal of having contrast between savagery and beauty, life and death, love and hate etc. However it’s probably much more likely that I saw people doing it, so I started doing it and now it’s just a habit.
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3DTotal: Yeah, I like the contrast explanation - that makes a lot of sense looking at your gallery. I noticed also that several of your characters are quite stylised - can you tell us a little more about this style of yours?
Jeffrey: I think I’ve gone through a lot of styles over the years. Right now I'm exploring textures and overlays, playing around with colors and hoping to find something interesting. The older I get, the more I seem to get further away from realism. I find myself trying to find soul or ambience for a piece rather than focusing on the more technical aspects of rendering. I'm getting more interested in loose brush strokes and the beauty in the randomness of natural textures and patterns. I'll often scan in traditional mediums like spotches of paint and overlay them onto my work to get some interesting effects
(at least I like they are interesting!) |
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Your rating: Rating: 4.22, Votes: 9 Branko on Sat, 29 January 2011 6:17pm
The Little Mermaid image is fantastic, mad respects!
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