I'm rusty!!

Hello everybody!

So here it is, I'm finally doing it! After years of using Painter, I've decided to give Photoshop a real try. This piece started as a brush experiment/emulation study using one of Aurelie Neyret's marvelous illustration (Aurelie, tu es fantastique!) and it evolved into a quick illustration.

I'm liking Photoshop so far! Nice textural brushes. I'll keep using it.

...using an ink brush

A little drawing for my kids with a loose watercolor brush technic I'm experimenting with.

A piece of fan art I did for my good friend Kevin MerrimanHe's making a comic book involving a Mariachi Band that ends up in Japan. Very fun story!

I saw this Influence Map on Kris Anka's blog and I thought: "What a great idea!" So I did mine. Very cool to gather all the artists who influenced me the most in one place! Here it is:

When you get home and you see this, how can you not be happy?! To Tanya, Thomas, Jonathan and Benjamin (he's in the picture too. look closely! :) )

One night, I had this dream that my team of concept artists was attacked by an evil red eyed robot. The whole office turned into a gloomy green color. Everybody started crying like babies. Then I woke up.

I told my dream to the guys in the morning. Matt Armstrong drew this a few minutes later. He added a cool end to the story: me destroying the evil robot of doom with my laser saber!



How cool is that!?

Another portrait of me by Matthew, on the shoulder of a huge Robot this time (Matt likes Robots A LOT)



And another quick sketch of me during a meeting by the very talented Jason Kim



I just love the guys I work with

And not only because they draw pictures of me as a super hero! :)

Working with people you love and respect is priceless!

Gramps at the Beach

"Carifying" the World!

A few pieces from Cars 2 until I can post the concept I've been doing for 2 years now on our super awesome highly top secret next project!


A Before and After example:
Sometime we do paint overs of 3D levels to give suggestions to our World Builders. Concept doesn't stop with one pretty picture. It's often a back and forth between 2D and 3D.




Icons and Logos:
Surprisingly, I had a lot of fun designing those. I never thought I'll do something like that. I'm not the best at it but it was a fun departure from what I usually do. Thank you Illustrator!

Our 2 year old, French/American toddler Jonathan is a bottle of joy! His favorite activities are:

- sitting on his potty
- wearing my shoes
- turning everything into a hat
- destroying books
- repainting our house with crayons
- dismantling his Buzz Light year
- and playing with toilet paper

I love this little guy.

Here is a Christmas card for my wife Tanya.

Shhhh, don't tell her... two more days before Christmas!

We were trying to find a cool look for the Wii version of Cars 2. We experimented with a cell shaded look. It didn't work out at the end but it would have been really cool to have an entire game in that style!

For fun

I had some good times playing Zelda on my gameboy... It was a long time ago!

Even on a piece with not many details you can still use a lot of visual help!
Why wasting time guessing what something looks like when you're one click away from knowing exactly what it is (that click for me is mostly Google Image). Then you have more time for what really matters: composition, look and feel, gameplay requirements, lightning etc.

Here is a piece I made for the city area of the Italy track. I wanted to point out the amount of research that goes into a piece like this. Gathering the right reference is a big part of a concept artist job.

Follow the arrows!

I'm just a big fan of Steam-punk. Everytime I've got to draw a rusted pipe or an old factory, it makes me happy!

Look and Feel Piece

Drawing, Black & White Study and color

On the bottom left corner of the color sheet, you'll see the block-out I started with, (provided by the World guys) It's what they do first to test the fun of the gameplay then it goes to us, concept artists for a visual pass.

When I first heard I was going to work on Cars II the video game, I have to be honest, I was not super excited! Cars is my least favorite movie in Pixar's history.
So I was pleasantly surprise by how fun this project was. "Caryfing" environments and everything around was a real challenge and surprisingly enjoyable!
Here is some concept I did for C.H.R.OM.E., the secret spy academy facility which was used for the main menu of the game. Big responsibility!
I'm joining to this post the car research that went into it and a few explorations.