3DTotal: Hi Jesse. Now most artists that we interview talk about a moment during their childhood when they picked up a pencil/crayon for the first time, which sparked off an interest in art. Can you recall yours and also what was the image you drew?
Jesse: Not really, I must admit. I was never particularly good at drawing as a child. Mostly I enjoyed building my own Transformers from Lego, but then, who didn’t? It was only during university that I finally got some drawing classes. While I loved those, drawing and painting is still primarily a means to an end for me. It’s the designing of worlds I’m really interested in. For me, painting digitally is an extremely fast way to feed ideas onto canvas. Should future technology allow for an even faster process, I would most likely embrace it. I enjoy painting very much, but the process itself is never my main focus.		  
    3DTotal: So when you’re fleshing out a new world, what are the primary things you tend to start off with, or does each one differ depending on the brief?
Jesse: In game development you very rarely set off to build an entirely new world from scratch, but it's very cool when it happens. I consider world design as a tool to underline, to emphasize. Meaning that if you have a storyline, even if it's just a rudimentary one, you could “build your world around it” so its drama would become bigger. Or, if you have a certain game mechanic, you could shape the environment around that. One thing I've learned over time is that often you'll be intimidated by the sheer vastness of the amount of work involved in creating a coherent world - but the solution to that is always to just get started somewhere. New ideas are bound to pop up in your head as you go.

3DTotal: After getting your Masters degree in Industrial Design, what lead you to pursue a career in games?
Jesse: During my studies I spent a lot of time building single player levels for Doom and Quake 1. I thought it was just such an incredible thrill to be able to walk around inside your own ideas, so to speak. It was then that I decided I wanted to “build worlds” for a living. I applied for a job as a level designer at Playlogic, a small games studio in the Netherlands, and I was hired. However, it turned out I had been quite naive about the game industry; pretty soon after I started working there I found that a lot of the basic world design had shifted from the level designers to the concept artists. Thankfully my employer offered me a chance to do some concept work on one of the running projects, and after that I stuck to creating concept art.

    
 

3DTotal: The majority of matte painters and illustrators tend to use certain 3D elements within their images to set up correct perspective, scale or to use as a starting base. With your background in producing 3D levels, have you ever been tempted to mix the two mediums together?
Jesse: I frequently do rough 3D setups for certain scenes. In general I’ll use any trick I can think of to get my idea across; I have no reservations about any techniques, like 3D, use of photos or references.
It’s the end result that counts for me. The goal of my work is to present ideas; and as to how I create the visuals, well that’s not really important. For me personally, it’s what differentiates me as a concept artist from an illustrator: I aim to generate ideas, and not so much pretty pictures.

3DTotal: You spent quite a good deal working on the “Mistbound” world. Can you tell us a bit more about this?
Jesse: During my time at W!Games (a small independent developer from Amsterdam) I helped visualising their new in-house IP (intellectual property) called Mistbound. The world is the setting for a series of smaller downloadable games, the first of which, Greed Corp, was released in early 2008. Mistbound is essentially about human greed. You have this extremely lush set of islands, but relentless industrialisation takes such a heavy toll on the world that the islands start collapsing.
Conflicts arise, and this is where the player gets pitched in. There’s not a fixed format for the games;
the common factor for them is that they all take place in the same universe. That made it all the more interesting to work on it.

    
     
 
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