All the colors of Andrew Jones, Creative Director at Massive Black.
CGSociety traveled to Montreal, Canada last September to attend the ADAPT Conference. Over this coming year we will explore some of the superb talent presented at the event.
Continuing the series of ADAPT 2007 speakers, we spoke with the dynamic concept artist, Andrew Jones. Jones, a master user of Corel, is the Creative Director at Massive Black, co-founder of ConceptArt.Org, and innovator of an art form he calls “Shape Sifting”.
Andrew Jones always knew his interests were in art, and when he was sixteen he began his studies in Alla Prima painting and fine art portraiture at the Boulder Figure Academy in Colorado. He would practice his passion at the Pearl Street Mall, a beautiful area with a courthouse, parks and shopping. “This park had a heavy constituency of runaways and homeless, very colorful people, so I would go to the park and I would draw portraits of the homeless and runaways."
He would draw perhaps twenty portraits a day, and excelled at his craft enough to gain the interest of tourists who were willing to pay him for his work. “Once I realized that I could make money from drawing people, then that was the end of my food service career. It was a huge shift and I knew I wasn’t going back.”
Making the world his inspiration, Jones traveled around Europe drawing portraits and supported himself in college by drawing portraits on the beach. “To date, that is still some of my fondest memories. You work all day and you really feel it. I used to use this red chalk and my hands and pants would be covered in it. It was a good hard day’s work.” Jones has been true to himself and had followed his bliss, and in return, his bliss has followed him.
His first true career job came to him between his junior and senior year in the form of an internship at ILM. For three months he got his first real taste of the industry and professional workflow and met his mentor, Iain McCaig. Armed with this knowledge from “an amazing place like ILM,” Jones returned to his final year of college to digest what he had learned and prepare himself for his next step.
After graduation, Jones looked at all his opportunities and selected a position at Black Isle Studios “because it gave me the opportunity to hit the ground running and really be drawing.”
He was attracted to the artists that worked there: Kevin Llewellyn, Jason Manley, Vance Kovacs, Justin Sweet, “a lot of artists I really admired. I chose Black Isle because I knew I would be surrounded by artists I really respected and a lot of skill sets that I wanted to adapt into my work.” However, though drawn to the talent, the location in Orange County, Los Angeles was just not where Jones wanted to be.
After three months, he returned to Europe to draw portraits and after a period of regeneration, accepted a job as a Concept Artist at Nintendo’s Retro Studios working on the Metroid series. “Metroid was a really special game to me; when I was around eleven, that game was really important at that moment in my development, so to have that opportunity to bring that game to a new generation was a real honor.” He worked on five Metroid games in as many years, plus several other titles for Nintendo and NST.
About four years ago, during his time at Retro, Jones and co-worker Jason Manley teamed up to launch ConceptArt.Org. They had attended art school together where they had their first experience being a part of an artistic community. After graduating they each went their separate ways, but “found we missed that feeling, that community.” ConceptArt.Org was started just between those friends, a single location for a collection of portfolios. To increase the interactivity, Manley suggested adding a forum where other artists could register to post and share their art. It grew slowly at first, then suddenly took on life, and now boasts over 85,000 users.
They began to ask, “What are we doing? After sitting here making other people rich all day long I guess we could focus the effort to making ourselves rich at the same time.” That was the birth of what became the studio, Massive Black.
Originally it started as a collective of four or five freelance artists working from different locations. “We made Massive Black look like a huge entity, even though we were just artists living around. Jason was even living in his garage.” Their success not only allowed them to move to a single studio but demanded it, and the continuing growth has recently allowed them to move to a much larger studio in downtown San Francisco with a studio in Shanghai, with works to develop additional studios in Asia.
“I think we are unmatched as far as quality goes, because the guys just get better and faster day by day, the quality increases, and we’ve become more efficient, and keep getting more clients and more diverse work, so it’s been really exciting to see them grow. There’s been nothing the team can’t handle, and handle it with such grace and expertise.”
The crew at Massive Black is so strong, it’s allowed Jones the freedom to explore new avenues, one of which is an innovative twist he calls digital live painting, or Shape Sifting. “Last April I had the opportunity through a friend of mine, Lorin Ashton, who is San Francisco’s #1 underground DJ for the past five years. He was on this big underground communication west coast tour. I had already worked on some album cover art for him, and he thought I could do some airbrushing or something.
He didn’t really know what he wanted me to do, he just wanted me on tour. The tour was going to be about a month long.” It was an unpaid gig with only room and board and living on a bus, but was going to be an adventure. “I was going to have to do something that was really worthwhile to me, and really exciting.” Jones realized often concerts have a traditional artist off to the side working on an easel with acrylics or oils, but the size and the medium had serious limitations, so Jones came up with the idea to plug into the projectors and do live digital painting. “It just seemed like it made a huge amount of sense. It was exciting, but it scared me, I had never done this before and had never seen it done.”
They spent the next month at different venues, and Jones was hooked. He added a guitar strap to his Wacom tablet, and now it rarely leaves his side. He even flies with it as carryon luggage.
“After the Bassnectar Tour I went on a tour of Japan for a month with a DJ called Bluetech. In Northern California we have a series of big underground music festivals where between 2000-5000 people show up and renegades take over these natural areas, forests and mountains, and have this amazing music that plays all night long. So this summer I’ve been touring all those different festivals, I’ve been to Europe for the Glade Electronic Music Festival. It’s been weekend to weekend. I just finished a festival called “Symbiosis” I was painting for four days at that festival, then I hopped on a plane and came to ADAPT.” He painted at one of the ADAPT parties, too.
“In a way, all the live painting I was doing was just practicing for Burning Man.” Burning Man is an annual experimental art and music festival in what is known as Black Rock City out near Reno, Nevada. Every year tens of thousands of open minded creatives come to camp in the barren desert and over a week build a city of art together, sharing ideas and experiences in a climate that is a challenge in itself. There is no commerce allowed, and it is a leave-no-trace environmentally aware event.
“It lasts for a week like a giant sand painting, and then it all fades away afterwards. It’s a great opportunity to be whatever you are, whatever you want to be, and share whatever you can share.” I have personally attended two of these events and I have never seen anything else like it. I always return utterly exhausted and completely regenerated.
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www.cgfan.com
All the colors of Andrew Jones, Creative Director at Massive Black.
CGSociety traveled to Montreal, Canada last September to attend the ADAPT Conference. Over this coming year we will explore some of the superb talent presented at the event.
Continuing the series of ADAPT 2007 speakers, we spoke with the dynamic concept artist, Andrew Jones. Jones, a master user of Corel, is the Creative Director at Massive Black, co-founder of ConceptArt.Org, and innovator of an art form he calls “Shape Sifting”.
Andrew Jones always knew his interests were in art, and when he was sixteen he began his studies in Alla Prima painting and fine art portraiture at the Boulder Figure Academy in Colorado. He would practice his passion at the Pearl Street Mall, a beautiful area with a courthouse, parks and shopping. “This park had a heavy constituency of runaways and homeless, very colorful people, so I would go to the park and I would draw portraits of the homeless and runaways."
He would draw perhaps twenty portraits a day, and excelled at his craft enough to gain the interest of tourists who were willing to pay him for his work. “Once I realized that I could make money from drawing people, then that was the end of my food service career. It was a huge shift and I knew I wasn’t going back.”
Making the world his inspiration, Jones traveled around Europe drawing portraits and supported himself in college by drawing portraits on the beach. “To date, that is still some of my fondest memories. You work all day and you really feel it. I used to use this red chalk and my hands and pants would be covered in it. It was a good hard day’s work.” Jones has been true to himself and had followed his bliss, and in return, his bliss has followed him.
His first true career job came to him between his junior and senior year in the form of an internship at ILM. For three months he got his first real taste of the industry and professional workflow and met his mentor, Iain McCaig. Armed with this knowledge from “an amazing place like ILM,” Jones returned to his final year of college to digest what he had learned and prepare himself for his next step.
After graduation, Jones looked at all his opportunities and selected a position at Black Isle Studios “because it gave me the opportunity to hit the ground running and really be drawing.”
He was attracted to the artists that worked there: Kevin Llewellyn, Jason Manley, Vance Kovacs, Justin Sweet, “a lot of artists I really admired. I chose Black Isle because I knew I would be surrounded by artists I really respected and a lot of skill sets that I wanted to adapt into my work.” However, though drawn to the talent, the location in Orange County, Los Angeles was just not where Jones wanted to be.
After three months, he returned to Europe to draw portraits and after a period of regeneration, accepted a job as a Concept Artist at Nintendo’s Retro Studios working on the Metroid series. “Metroid was a really special game to me; when I was around eleven, that game was really important at that moment in my development, so to have that opportunity to bring that game to a new generation was a real honor.” He worked on five Metroid games in as many years, plus several other titles for Nintendo and NST.
About four years ago, during his time at Retro, Jones and co-worker Jason Manley teamed up to launch ConceptArt.Org. They had attended art school together where they had their first experience being a part of an artistic community. After graduating they each went their separate ways, but “found we missed that feeling, that community.” ConceptArt.Org was started just between those friends, a single location for a collection of portfolios. To increase the interactivity, Manley suggested adding a forum where other artists could register to post and share their art. It grew slowly at first, then suddenly took on life, and now boasts over 85,000 users.
They began to ask, “What are we doing? After sitting here making other people rich all day long I guess we could focus the effort to making ourselves rich at the same time.” That was the birth of what became the studio, Massive Black.
Originally it started as a collective of four or five freelance artists working from different locations. “We made Massive Black look like a huge entity, even though we were just artists living around. Jason was even living in his garage.” Their success not only allowed them to move to a single studio but demanded it, and the continuing growth has recently allowed them to move to a much larger studio in downtown San Francisco with a studio in Shanghai, with works to develop additional studios in Asia.
“I think we are unmatched as far as quality goes, because the guys just get better and faster day by day, the quality increases, and we’ve become more efficient, and keep getting more clients and more diverse work, so it’s been really exciting to see them grow. There’s been nothing the team can’t handle, and handle it with such grace and expertise.”
The crew at Massive Black is so strong, it’s allowed Jones the freedom to explore new avenues, one of which is an innovative twist he calls digital live painting, or Shape Sifting. “Last April I had the opportunity through a friend of mine, Lorin Ashton, who is San Francisco’s #1 underground DJ for the past five years. He was on this big underground communication west coast tour. I had already worked on some album cover art for him, and he thought I could do some airbrushing or something.
He didn’t really know what he wanted me to do, he just wanted me on tour. The tour was going to be about a month long.” It was an unpaid gig with only room and board and living on a bus, but was going to be an adventure. “I was going to have to do something that was really worthwhile to me, and really exciting.” Jones realized often concerts have a traditional artist off to the side working on an easel with acrylics or oils, but the size and the medium had serious limitations, so Jones came up with the idea to plug into the projectors and do live digital painting. “It just seemed like it made a huge amount of sense. It was exciting, but it scared me, I had never done this before and had never seen it done.”
They spent the next month at different venues, and Jones was hooked. He added a guitar strap to his Wacom tablet, and now it rarely leaves his side. He even flies with it as carryon luggage.
“After the Bassnectar Tour I went on a tour of Japan for a month with a DJ called Bluetech. In Northern California we have a series of big underground music festivals where between 2000-5000 people show up and renegades take over these natural areas, forests and mountains, and have this amazing music that plays all night long. So this summer I’ve been touring all those different festivals, I’ve been to Europe for the Glade Electronic Music Festival. It’s been weekend to weekend. I just finished a festival called “Symbiosis” I was painting for four days at that festival, then I hopped on a plane and came to ADAPT.” He painted at one of the ADAPT parties, too.
“In a way, all the live painting I was doing was just practicing for Burning Man.” Burning Man is an annual experimental art and music festival in what is known as Black Rock City out near Reno, Nevada. Every year tens of thousands of open minded creatives come to camp in the barren desert and over a week build a city of art together, sharing ideas and experiences in a climate that is a challenge in itself. There is no commerce allowed, and it is a leave-no-trace environmentally aware event.
“It lasts for a week like a giant sand painting, and then it all fades away afterwards. It’s a great opportunity to be whatever you are, whatever you want to be, and share whatever you can share.” I have personally attended two of these events and I have never seen anything else like it. I always return utterly exhausted and completely regenerated.
www.cgfan.com
It is not for the faint of heart. The sun, heat, and sandstorms scorch you during the day, and at night which can range from comfortable to freezing, the four miles of city pulse with every sort of light and sound imaginable. Everything must be packed in; there is no civilization conveniently nearby and no way to leave once you arrive. At the end, every scrap of debris down to a paper matchstick is removed by the participants and the playa is respectfully returned to its natural state. The attendees are adamant about this, and I have seen them, and assisted in, chasing down the newcomers who do not respect the community or the environment.
“A great thing about Burning Man,” said Jones “ is at a concert I might work for an hour and a half, and you get off stage and you are still pumped, you just want to keep drawing. At Burning Man, there were several days I would start painting as soon as it got dark, and I wouldn’t finish till sunrise, painting all the way through. Part of my vision is almost being a “visual stenographer”. I try to record the essence of these events. I see videos of Burning Man, and they never really capture it. Painting allows me to depict the energetic exchange of what is really happening between a DJ and a crowd. The DJ is putting his energy into the computer and outputting the sound, and the sound is going inside all these people and causing them to dance, and the DJ sees that and the energy comes back into him and makes him decide how to change the tracks and the tempo, so there is this whole amazing symbiotic relationship.”
Jones continues to explore the limits of all his creative outlets. Two years after its launch, ConceptArt.Org began offering workshops, giving people a physical place to meet and explore artist’s boundaries. That, in turn, spiraled off into sketchbooks and groups of artists who gather to meet all over the world. “We are really happy about that, and continue the workshops based on that premise.”
He just completed another seminar in Seattle with over 450 students, renting out and entire warehouse by the Seattle pier and utilizing two floors. This was the most epic of all the events they had done. One room was digital with 17 projectors and screens set around the perimeter, with artists manning the projectors giving lectures all day. Upstairs was the Figure Drawing room. Michael Hussar, Brom, Shawn Barber, and Todd Lockwood are only a few of an impressive list of instructors. The weekend opened with a Friday night party at the Space Needle where they rented the entire conservatory deck and lower deck. It was a catered event with three live bands and Jones doing live painting.
Past workshops relied upon a chaotic element, offering the equipment and allowing the class to unfold. “This one had a little more organization, still allowing the magic to happen, but we implemented more of a framework so the artists had a better idea of where to go and what to do, to allow more information to come across.”
They had one main PA system and one big screen at the end of the room. One artist would give a lecture, on for example, character design, while the 15 screens surrounding the room would each have a professional designing characters to help reinforce the main speaker’s lecture. Students could go anywhere in the room, walk around, bring their chair and see multiple artists working on the topic the speaker was addressing, allowing students to not only listen to the philosophy but see multiple artists interpretations in action.
“We had a smaller room with the guys from Massive Black. A normal day at Massive Black is a bunch of guys in a room working on a scene. One of the days had Massive Black artists who would simultaneously design a scene, representing a typical day in the Massive Black office to show how they handled the workflow.”
Something new to this workshop was live streaming content. To keep the classes intimate they cap off the attendees at 500, so a lot of students might miss out. The cost of the class, plus travel, food, and hotel can get prohibitive, and Jones realizes it can be an investment. It is a transformational event, and certainly worth the cost, but it’s still out of reach for a lot of people. That is not Jones’s desire or intention, so they’ve introduced a live streaming content. This year two ConceptArt.Org forum participants, Oblio and Phong, took cameras around to capture the event and conduct interviews. Included was an IRC chat box so people could ask questions. Jones did a few interviews at the event live, with interview questions generated on the spot by international ConceptArt users.
Lorne Lanning from Oddworld was the keynote speaker. “The speech that Lorne gave was incredible and it shook a lot of people. It was exciting to see someone who was so well respected be able to talk so openly.” Lanning spoke about the role and responsibility we have as artists, what we are doing with this mass medium, and what is possible; why he created Oddworld, and the social aspects of the time. He made mention to the awakening within artists and human beings. It wasn’t just about, this is how you get a job, but encouraging artists to take a deeper look about what they are doing and how they are doing it."
“There are a lot of people that come to the workshops with the intentions to get a job and support themselves as an artist, and I really encourage that. Once you get there, you have the opportunity for another level of responsibility. That is where I am at; I can support myself doing art, that is not a problem. But now that I can support myself, what am I doing with it? It invites a whole new opportunity of responsibility. It’s the opportunity to choose what I want to work on, that the job is within my alignment and I feel good about. It’s easy to teach somebody how to draw monsters or how to draw the figure better or give some theories on color, but in the greater scheme we are trying to transform people’s lives, and do that by cluing them in on what the potential is.”
There are more events to come that are being considered or are in planning, and there have been many invitations. The next event is in Shanghai this spring. London, possibly Italy, many of the big US cities including New York, Chicago, and LA, and perhaps some future SIGGRAPH are also on the list.
A new website called Illuminated http://www.Illuminated.com is a 2.5D web series. Jones is dedicated to doing more digital downloads on ConceptArt.Org. “You can get about an hour of content, lessons and lectures, on par with your average DVD, and it’s a lot more environmentally responsible since there is no packaging. When I do the live performances, I record the streams.
I edit them to music and do voiceovers describing the process and include anything from esoteric advice on life to stories on the pieces to the techniques on how I am using Painter. I’m doing a Sundance party, Macworld, a Hawaiian Burning Man party. I am putting together my tour dates. Wow, I have tour dates now! It’s no accident, I worked hard! I saw the alternative a while ago.”
Jones has one of the most profound attitudes of any artists I have met. “If you go with the reincarnation model, it probably serves you to make this world better because if you are going to hit this place again, you might as well do what you can in this term to make it a better place to reincarnate to later on. But you might as well go for it now, because there is no promise of going for it later.”
Andrew Jone's site
Blog
Concept Art
Massive Black
Ballistic Publishing’s ‘d’artiste: Concept Art’
Industrial Light & Magic
Illuminated
Bass Nectar
BlueTech Online
Symbiosis Events
Seminar links
Photos from seminar: Daniel Zetterström
Videos from seminar
ADAPT Montreal
ADAPT interview: Ed Jones
ADAPT interview: Syd Mead
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发表于 2008-6-26 20:17:03
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