My husband is an avid gamer and game reviewer. One of his passions is tackling the matter of narrative in games by examining their current state in the medium, and anticipating their development. This piece was done to accompany one such feature article in C&G Monthly, a Canadian pop culture magazine focusing on comics and video games.

Being married to someone who is passionate about games, it’s inevitable I suppose that I share some of his love for them. I’ll admit I’m much more of a backseat gamer than one that actually plays games, mostly because I don’t have the reflexes for many games and I tend to panic under the time-sensitive stresses that are core to the gameplay of most games. But I do enjoy watching the games that we buy, in  particular the ones that have good storylines.

Rough concepts for the illustration

To me, the current attitudes towards stories in games is similar to the attitude people had towards comics when I was growing up. Comics were viewed as this sub-par combination of badly drawn pictures and bland, 2-dimensional stories for children and no-too-bright adults. In recent years, thanks to successful movie adaptations (or so i think), the public has come to accept that it is possible to tell a deep, meaningful and engaging story through comics, and at some level  it’s more socially acceptable now. Games, in turn, have moved in to fill the spot vacated by comics to being the pariahs of  storytelling.

Which is a darn shame because while some games still have bad stories, there are some stories to be enjoyed in the still-developing medium.  Stories in games are uniquely experienced, both as gamer and observer, and the bottom line is that it’s a bit unfair for people to dismiss the stories or to simply say that there is no story to be had.

So, when my husband said he was doing a piece about narrative in games, I wanted to cook up something that helped illustrate the article in a nutshell, in a way that looked hopefully more mature and intelligent. It’s not much, but I hope that combining a thoughtful essay with a picture that isn’t just space marine/bikini warrior will help to eventually get people to realize the same thing they did about comics – that both comics and games don’t need to be stupid entertainment for kids, and that you can get some good stories out of both.

]]> http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/06/cg-narrative-in-games/feed/ 2 http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/world-vision-spring-direct-mailer/ http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/world-vision-spring-direct-mailer/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 18:07:12 +0000 Charlene Chua http://blog.charlenechua.com/?p=882

Worked on this a couple of months ago with the good folks at Mclaren McCann Toronto.  The project was for World Vision’s Spring 2010 direct mailer. The job was to create an illustration for the envelope, which would be repurposed for the letter and note card inside. Additionally, I was asked to illustrate a little mask for kids that was to be printed with lenticular printing (remember those plasticy cards where you turn them and the image changes?).

The project was great fun and I really enjoyed working with the art director on creating the masks in particular. Their concept was ‘in like a lion, out like a lamb’, and the mask alternated between a lion’s face and a lamb’s. It was a bit of a challenge getting the design to work, since usually animal masks are molded to create the depth of an animal’s face, or else have some other materials attached to give the impression of fur. I tried using some more graphic elements to emphasize the two faces, while still keeping them friendly for the kids.

Here I am holding the masks:

The project was turned around quite quick – 2 or 3 weeks from start to finish. I did a main sketch for the envelope, and several versions of the lion and lamb characters to get the right pose for them:

Pose varients for lion and lamb characters

Sketch for enevelope back, with die and trims indicated.

Early rough for the lion mask

The project is featured as a case study on Mclaren’s website, so if you’re interested in learning more about the project do check it out here.

]]> http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/05/world-vision-spring-direct-mailer/feed/ 3 http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/04/lucid-media-atom-egoyan/ http://blog.charlenechua.com/2010/04/lucid-media-atom-egoyan/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:43:47 +0000 Charlene Chua http://blog.charlenechua.com/?p=858

Did this recently for Lucid Media. It’s the cover for the issue featuring Canadian director Atom Egoyan. The illustration is  portrait of him, with characters from his various movies woven into his hair. the watermark background is based off Armenian patterns in recognition of his heritage.

Here’s the work as it appeared (the inner black and white spot was another cover concept that we decided to use for the article instead):

Here were the roughs I did. I normally don’t do color roughs, but decided to for this one:

Spring is here! Happy Spring! This piece went out as a email promo with the message ‘spring cleaning is good for your soul’. Below are some of the rough concepts I drew up beforehand – thank you to everyone who gave their input!

Did this during a couple of Livestream sessions last week. I guess I forgot to post it up here.

If you missed the stream, you can see the recordings here. A good 2h of my computer screen and me rambling on about stuff! Hear my rant about Captain Planet!

Also, I just realized that the last year of my life practically disappeared from under me. At least, it seems that way when I look at my previous blog entries for 08 and 09.

Santa Fe Reporter cover

Did this recently for Santa Fe Reporter, for their 2009 ‘Sweat’ issue. The art director wanted a kickboxing girl (since that is a feature article), and it so happened that I already had a girl in a kickboxing pose from an old illustration. I showed it to her and she was happy with reusing it, with some new elements in the background.

santa fe reporter, cover sketch

So this was the sketch for the cover. I was asked to do something dynamic, with Chinese dragons, so I came up with the dragon and various lines and elements behind the girl to make her look cooler. I asked for the masthead so that I could work the design around the main elements on the page.

This was the final art, without the masthead.

The finished ‘traditional’ artwork.

With a bit of Photoshop tweaking to the colors.

Illustration demonstration of a space girl in Illustrator CS3. Speed rendered in about an hour.

Here was the original sketch, and some other ideas I pitched to the editor. I quite liked the one with the words going into the head, but the one they picked was nice too. The article was about basic financial terms for people in the human resource industry.