Guest Post - Alex Tooth (Pt1 - Introductions!)

Hello!

Well, I thought rather than extensively plan out any super detailed and structured set of posts, I have decided to just jump in with a new post and write something.

I have kindly been invited to contribute to this blog by Koshime, he has been a great help on getting me started in the industry and I think this will be a good way to give something back to "future Me's"! What I mean by this is give any tips and helping hands to the complete beginner.

So where to start... firstly I guess a bit about who I am would be useful! Then I'll try to give a chronological account of how I got from A to B and my plans to get to C over the next few years. I'll try to spread it out over a few posts whenever I have a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon or something :)

//////// So, who am I ? ////////

I'm a freelance illustrator working in the gaming industry, this covers your tabletop games, collectable cards games, video games and anything similar. I work pretty much exclusively in Digital, though I have some pencil skills - really the bulk of my work is done on a PC with a Wacom Intuos4 tablet. I paint my images in Adobe Photoshop and I use a lot of Autodesk Maya for any 3D bits and pieces I might require.

I certainly class myself in illustration and not concept design. Though some of my work includes designing, I don't have as many aspirations of purely doing this for a living. The distinction for me is really the story-telling aspect of illustration, which I have found not as prevalent in concept work.

I have been taking professional jobs for around 6months now for companies including Catalyst game labs, doing some work on their Battletech line, also Fantasy Flight Games, Alderac Entertainment and most recently Privateer Press.

I only do work in the Fantasy and Sci-Fi genres right now, and have little interest in "real-world" illustration projects.

//////// So - how did I end up doing this kind of work? ////////

Now I know this is where 99/100 illustrators say they were drawing since their mum put a pencil in their hand at the age of 2. Well this really isn't true for me - honestly I rarely drew a single thing until I was 27. So my route into this may not be the usual one.

However I have been playing video games since I first got an Acorn Electron in 1986 or so. This went the typical route of NES, PC, SNES, PS1, PS2 and so on - I always knew the games industry would be where I'd end up career wise, in some shape or form.

Luckily, at school I could draw things easily and Art and Design were really the only subjects I could do in my game-geek adolescence. I ended up taking animation at Wolverhampton University - total waste of time, but Uni was the thing you used to do after school. I am not saying Uni is a bad thing, certainly not - and I will be writing about the benefits in a future post. As with most colleges, you either teach yourself something or fail - so I managed to learn some Maya4 from a good book and put together some 3D animations to get through the course. Nothing I could land a job with after Uni, BUT funilly enough it's a tool I still use to this day, 8years on.

So the 5-6 years following Uni, I did various "normal" jobs to get by, factory worker mainly, various shop assistants - I am sure many of you can identify with me here. I eventually ended up as a games tester for about 3 years, which I always heard was a "door" into the games industry. It's not by the way, so don't let people convince you otherwise! Really it's a bunch of 20-30 somethings playing games all day for a pretty much minimal wage - I won't lie though, it's a fun job and I am sure there's WAY worse things to do :)

Then one day around my 27th birthday, early 2008 I was looking around a local magazine shop and this one glossy magazine literally BEAMED "take meee!" this was of course ImagineFX magazine. So after flicking through for a little while, I was blown away, I didn't know what the hell I was looking at, where this imagery came from, who made it - all I knew is I liked what I saw, ALOT. If you're not aware of ImagineFX, it's a fantasy art magazine started in 2006, I'd recommend heading over too www.imaginefx.com and checking out what they do!

Discovering this Artwork and reading about the processes involved, seeing amateur works to uber pro stuff - finding out people were doing this stuff in their bedrooms on their home computer, no paintbrushes and canvasses, it really suddenly dawned on me "Hey I could be doing this!" - after a short while I gave up my job as a games tester, moved home and started learning about Art.

//////// Phew! OK, so you may be wondering why I just wrote all that? ////////

I wanted to make the point that anyone can do this, and that you don't need special degrees, mentors, extensive art training, drawing since a child, special talents or knowledge - I hadn't heard of Frank Frazetta or Wizards of the Coast until a couple of years ago! So I really hope some of you can get the extra boost of confidence after reading stories like these, that little push you needed to make a good decision about your future - remember life is short and it's never too late.

I am now just over 2 years after "picking up the pencil" and now making a living wage out of my Artwork. And over the course of my next few posts I want to share all the key moments, stages in the process and my plans for the future. It's not a complicated thing, and it's getting easier and easier everyday with the aid of blogs like these, forums and the wonderful, helpful, loving and constantly growing fantasy art community we have here online at our fingertips :)

I am really looking forward to sharing my experiences here and reading about others like me, just getting started with their Artwork.

//////// Study and Personal work 2009 ////////

//////// Personal work 2010 - featuring in "Expose 9" ////////

//////// Study and personal work 2011 ////////