Working on Taking a Bath in 2010.

The Digital Age

By 2010, I had been working as an artist and art director in the video game industry for over twenty years, and was able to bring a high level of skill and expertise with digital tools like Photoshop and 3D Studio Max to my paintings. While Barks lit and photographed ping pong balls to get the lighting right on his ducks, and James Gurney created paper mâché models to use as reference for his Dinotopia paintings, I was starting to do much of my composition and reference work in 3D Max.

Doing my layouts in 3D allowed me a lot of flexibility. I created Scrooge's money bin, for example, in 3D, complete with props, character maquettes, the big brass gate, thousands of gold coins, etc.. Because the set was in a virtual environment, I could move the props, characters, lights, and camera around freely, experimenting until I had something I liked. It not only saved time, but 3D was a great visualization tool, helping me achieve compositions I'd never have done on my own with just pencil and paper. In the end, I still transferred the composition to board so I could paint it in oils -- that will never change -- but the process of getting to that stage was a whole new world. The age of digital technology was really just getting started.