Super thanks again to Jason at CRP for letting me do this one! Frogger is one of the most iconic video games out there, and to do the cover art for it is just pretty sweet awesome. Yes I said sweet awesome. It just is.

This is the cover for the North American version; Japan and Europe have different covers. This cover is aimed more at kids, and we tried to convey different things in the game, like the classic trucks and cars, as well as the new additions. Apparently this poor frog also has to hop over tanks, evade mean snakes and rats and dodge Apache helicopters. I don’t know why, perhaps he escaped from Raccoon City or something.

My original art featured a night scene as I thought the lights would show up better. But I guess since the other covers featured day scenes we hanged it to a day scene as well. Below is the original color scheme and art. Frog had a longer tongue as well.

Did this for CG Monthly for an article called A Matter of Character: The complexities of character in video games. One of the things discussed was how simple characters like Pac Man and (original) Mario were more memorable because of their simplistic natures. The illustration is based around that theme, with the more complex character being anonymous with shades of grey. Look at the yellow bit more if you don’t immediately get it.

This was a piece done for CG Monthly for an editorial piece about choice in games.

The premise of the article was that when given a choice, gamers tended to choose endings that were most beneficial to the player. This  presents a unique storytelling problems for developers who want to give players more control over their expereience with the game, but who also want to tell stories that don’t end with ‘and the hero saved the day and was loved by all’.

I wanted something to do with games to drive home the point of choice. I was a bit tired of doing controllers pointing, so I came up with the UFO catcher idea instead. It’s a bit of a personal joke too; people tend to not think of UFO catchers as games but they are always at arcades, along with those annoying photo snapshot booths (well at least they were back in Singapore).

The pixel people were a way to try and tie things back with video games, and to make the scenes stand out. I did them in Illustrator and they  were quite nicely reused as decorative bits to the article. I apologise for the somewhat crappy pixel art – it’s not something I do, but it was an interesting experiment. If you want to see some good pixel art, pop by Superbrothers‘ site for some really nice work.

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.

Finally had some time yesterday to work on something not work related. Since God of War 3 is out today, I thought this was a suitable celebration.  Technically the image should be flipped to accommodate Kratos’ (the dude in the white circle) red tattoos on the other arm. I decided to make the color scheme orange instead of red, since  a lot of art based off the game features red and black. Orange seemed like something high energy which is something I wanted to emphasize over the violence and blood apparent in the game.

Top is final color work, bottom is the sketch on 8.5×11 paper.