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.

Did this fairly recently as a promo to folks in the kid’s market. It was meant to be a Spring thing, but I suppose it fits in with Summer as well. On a side note, the NY trip was great. Went to Surtex and the National Stationary Show, met clients, hung out with friends.

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 (more…)

These were some of the unused sketches that I did last year for the laptop skin project for Acco Brands. You can see the final art of the ones the picked here and here.

Did this some time ago for Penthouse magazine’s erotic fiction article. This is the fullpage illustration, and it was accompanied by a spot. You can see both illustrations on my website: fullpage and spot.

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!

This was a nice project for OWL and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The illustrations accompany a website about educating children about the recent earthquake in Haiti.

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.

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.