Meet The Artist: Scott Robertson

#61

Hey Scott,

Love your art and DVDs it’s great to have a pro take the time out and do all the books,dvds,taking questions that you and the other artists have done for people like myself.

I know people have asked about what you learn in doing ID design. I just wondering more about your answer. Like in saying you can look at something and seeing how it works, are you saying that you really know how it does work? like if I want to draw buildings do I have to know about floor plans or cars do I need to know how an engine is all put together? Also is there books out there that teach these things? Do you just study the shapes and that’s all? Basicly I just want to know what books and such should I get since I want to study at home…maybe ones you learned from at school.

I was also wondering what other books and dvds that are coming from Design studio press? Is Feng’s artbook/sketchbook still coming out? any other books from other artists? Hopefully not to many questions but I was also wondering on the Iain McCaig dvds he says to look forward the 5th dvd…are you getting him do some more?

-nate

#62

Hi Scott

Was wondering what your take was on the fact that alot of concept designers for films and video games seem to be trained illustrators rather than designers, you being the one of the few exceptions, what do you think works best.
I have a degree in Product design and am just finishing a Ma in vehicle design and am interested in working in the entertainment industry, do you think employers would be interested in seeing good design or rather highly illustrive(sp?) drawings?

thanks
Paul

#63

Hi Scott
Thanls for this opportunity
How big in pixels is this image.

http://www.designstudiopress.com/forum/vbulletin/showthread.php?threadid=423

What is your photoshop resolution working set up, 1000 pixels wide to start and then up to add detail? Please let me know
Really impressive work.

B

#64

Hi Scott.
Are you and the people at Design Studio Press planning to reprint the hardcover edition of CONCEPT DESIGN? I’ve tried also on Amazon but it didn’t worked. Definitely that book looks like a real must-have.
Cheers

#65

Which books do you recommend? If one wants to be able learning to draw and paint vehicles especially cars. When is your book “how to draw vehicles” coming? Do you know some good books about perspective, rendering from another authors as complements? best cheers

#66

Hey Scott,

Your work is great, you always make me want to draw more. Anyway, on with the question.

What areas do you feel yourself lacking, what part of your work or techniques would you like to improve from where you are now? Just curious I guess. Keep up the good work.

#67

I also have a question about a tutorial the “how to draw cars the hotwheel way” book. There is a little tutorial in there about the technique you use to “build” cars. How do you keep those help lines you draw to get the shape right from mixing?

I always tend to lose track on what lines go where. The tutorial has nice color coded lines, but when using a pencil and paper it’s hard to differentiate the lines. Do you work on a big paper so the lines have enough space to themselves or maybe something else? Please enlighten me. Thanks.

#68

[color=white]Oh yea. I am a big fan of your work. Admire it on many levels. Very inspirational and great for reference (if you don’t mind) :thumbsup: [/color]

#69

Hi Scott,

I am currently studing computer animation but I am also interested in drawing and design. The main reason I chose this field, is the hope that one day I will be able to make some living out of something that started as hobby. Also, as it is something creative, I believe it wont easily become boring after many years of work.

I was wondering, whether such a successful career, has increased or not your interest and joy of drawing? Are there times you feel your job becoming a routine? or the differences between projects keep the interest high? Do you enjoy every project you do, or there are some which dont motivate or even challenge you?
As far as I know, working hours and deadlines in this industry can become quite stressful which can take all the pleasure of any activity.

And just by curiosity, after so many car designs you have done, what car do you drive?

Thank you for your time.

#70

Hi Scott,

At what point in your career did you realize that you where starting to become a bit of a celebrity in the Art world?

#71

Hi Scott
Can you critique this work I have done to get a better hold of Painter and Photoshop. I have done this using reference. Working hard on original stuff right now. Trying to get a hold of clear coats and metallic matt finishes. I will appreciate any comments in material indication rendering, lighting and composition.

Full design credit one of my favorite artists Mr Syd Mead, from Sentinel book, changed atmosphere, lighting and colors:

http://img25.exs.cx/img25/5114/ROAD_WEB.jpg

Ferrari Dino in matt metalic and clearcoat:

http://img25.exs.cx/img25/8695/DINO_MATE_WEB.jpg
http://img38.exs.cx/img38/6873/DINO_WEB.jpg

Regards
B

#72

from: Tr@ceR,
How do you come up with these designs? I know that that is not an easy question to answer but I often have a hard time thinking up nice concepts. Artist’s block is something that I experience often and I’m just wondering if you experience the same thing. If so, how do you overcome it?

ScoRo - I think it is a combination of things all coming together to make it easy to do endless design variations for any subject. Here are a couple of ideas on the subject. Travel and observe, when you are having trouble coming up with ideas do something else and usually you will be inspired to return to your design exercises. Things you might consider, head out to a museum, drop in on some of your friends to see what they are doing, join in on one of the many cool forum competitions, go see a movie, read, take a hike and try to mentally record serval new visual observations you had never thought of or looked closely enough to have seen in the past. In addition I really have to credit my ID education. In industrial design we were continually critiqued on the lack of originality in our deisgns if any existed. Also part of this education is to equip young designers with a powerful toolbox of methods they can apply to more easily create objects of their own design that the rest of the world has never seen before, or at least this is the ultimate goal.

Hope this helps you out.

#73

From: Jvaughan,
Given your usual rendering style is very tight, do you usually go through your entire process for digital works? For those not as familiar, do you completely set up and and do free hand perspective on everything prior to switching to digital, or do you work more loosely and then refine your perspective construction as your work, using just rough guides to start?

ScoRo – Thanks, good question. It depends on what I’m doing, but I usually find it easier to do my design work with traditional media and then scan these drawings to do the color rendering in Photoshop. It is hard for me to paint in color and do good ID work at the same time. I do work up designs digitally though with no prior line drawing to work over, but these are usually pretty sketchy. I find that this easier with environments than with other objects. It is interesting though that as the digital sketch starts becoming a piece I might want to make tighter I often find myself printing the piece at this point with a bunch of perspective guidelines on the top layer so I can refine the design with a traditional media line drawing overlay. After this I scan the new drawing back into the computer and scale it to match my rendering and if the line quality is nice or I want to show the lines as part of the style of the rendering I switch the line drawing layer to multiply so I can float it on top.

#74

From: Sykosys,
Sometimes clients can be … absurd in their demands. In your case, I would expect that you’d get some freedom, but have you ever had a client that you simply could not please? And, for that matter, have you ever had to tell a client to go stuff themselves in an impolitely described hole somewhere, because of their expectations?

ScoRo - I guess I do get a bit more freedom now than I did 15 years ago, but if you are doing freelance design work one of the most important things to remember is that it is their money and they have the right to spend it however the please. I do like to think that one of the reasons they hired me in the first place is that they are also interested in my opinions of their project. I share these in a polite way but I do not press if they are unresponsive to a change of direction. I think one way to avoid the frustration with poorly conceived and directed, design jobs is to always try and schedule a portion of your day to pursue personal projects. If you can do this it makes spending time on a client’s idea that you may or may not agree with a much easier task. Also on the idea of doing consulting work try very hard to keep your overhead as low as possible so are in a position to say NO to the jobs that really do not interest you.

#75

From: MWarsame,
I am a student still and was wondering, in your point of view, do you think breaking in the industry either Animation or game industry has gone harder, if so, what would you advice us to do to prepare?

ScoRo – I like to say that there will always be good jobs for good talent. I think that breaking into the game industry is easier that the animation world and easier than it has ever been. The game industry is currently on a roll and with the resolution improving once again on the next generation of consoles there will continue to be a growing demand for good designers as game companies look for newer content and the experience of game play inches closer to the feature film experience. If you really want to work in the entertainment design field you currently will have the best opportunities if you can do original designs illustrated to a high level covering primarily environments, characters and to a lesser extent vehicles and props. Also try to design these subjects for story lines which take place in the past, present and future.

#76

From: scottsch,
Is your book “How to Draw Vehicles” going to be out this year?

ScoRo – I just hired some more help at Design Studio Press, which if all goes well should free me back up to complete my books by the end of the year.

From: scottsch,
I have some questions about the content: Is it going to include color rendering lessons, and is it going to have a section on creating vehicles from scratch - focusing on the design aspects of the car, not just the drawing technique?

ScoRo – Yes, it looks like it will be two books right now. The first covering drawing, design and matte surface shading. The second will cover material indication and color rendering with both traditional and digital media. Most likely the first book I will finish will be Drawthrough 1, a collection of my past work loaded with hundreds of new sketches not many have seen before.

From: scottsch,
What types of objects from the real world (i.e. reference material) do you bring into the creative vehicle design process - or do you just make everything up as you go? I watched the Gnomon DVD on hovercraft - and the main thing I got from it was that I was watching an artist that was highly experienced and had a lot of ideas about form committed to memory. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone draw like that before - you were pulling things out of thin air while most other artists I watch are looking at reference when they draw. So, just wondering what some of these influences are that feed the idea process. Do you spend a lot of hours drawing from reference, or do you try to be creative as much as possible? In school they teach people to draw from reference as much as possible, but when you try to switch to making things up and being creative, it’s not exactly an automatic thing. Are there some tricks to making the transition from copying what you see to actually inventing forms?

ScoRo – Good questions and observations on the problems with learning how to draw by only working from reference. I usually only pull reference to work from if I need to design to a specific historical time period. When I’m practicing my drawing skills I do not work from reference. I prefer to try and create forms from my own imagination. One of the problems of trying to learn to draw by using reference or from observation only is that you really do not need to know anything about perspective drawing to achieve high quality drawings. If you can visualize what you are looking as flat 2D shapes it is a matter of redrawing these shapes to depict what you are observing. When you are then asked to draw something of your own design from your imagination you quickly realize that this is something that you will have actually never done, and as a result you may struggle. If on the other hand you spend most of your time drawing without reference you will have developed a method to create forms from your imagination. This of course requires a very different set of drawing skills and is much more about mentally building models with a 3D eye versus a 2D shape-copying eye.

From: scottsch,
Is industry demand for traditional concept artists/designers (people who draw, more so than people that are in 3D production) as high as it used to be, or lower, or is demand getting much stronger now for good concept designers?

ScoRo – As I talked about a couple of posts back I think there will always be good jobs for good talent. In terms of workload in the development of a game there is a lot more to do in the 3D area of course but you need great content first and the fastest way to get to that is via 2D concept designers and the skills they bring. I think the demand for these individuals is growing as companies and studios search for visually stronger content.

#77

From: crossbones,
Who invented drawing through?

ScoRo – It dates back to the original artists who first conceived of and developed the perspective skills we still use today. If my memory serves me correctly I think that the latin definition for word for term perspective means, “to see through”.

#78

Hey Scott!

I’ve been watching the dvd’s day and night. Great, great stuff.

I’ve just moved to LA from Turkey (Computer Science wasn’t doing it for me so i wanted to start over, in a new place) and im attending a community college right now. I’m thinking of working hard, coming up with some good skills and applying to Art Center College transportation design. Unfortunately, my school doesn’t offer many classes that will help me prepare a portfolio for the major im applying for. I think my best shot is to get help from dvds, other instructional stuff and the internet to develop my skills (drawing day & night right now. long way to go :)) but you think is there anywhere else i can get help from? Does art center offer classes for students not attending art center college? I should probably meet up with a counselor but since you’re here and im now a fan, thought i could ask. Thank you and take care!

Gurkan

#79

Hey Scott

I hope I am not too late to add to the queue. Didn’t realize this new forum was going on, pretty cool idea.

Your publishing company seems to be rolling along great, and you are doing all of us a great service by bringing out books and instructional DVDs that have in the past been scarce or difficult to come by. I was wondering if you foresaw doing something like this when you were in school, or even when working during the last several years?

From your previous posts and in talking to you at other times I get the impression that the publishing side is at least a full time gig, and you have little or no time these days to actually sit down and do art. Are you happy being a publishing mogul, or do you at some point want to delegate some of that work so you can go back to being a designer/artist?

Thanks Scott

Francis

#80

OK guys. Last chance to ask Scott any questions. We’re going to archive this thread at the close of 11 April 2005.

Cheers,

Leonard