Items tagged with 'Art'

Behold yee the winner and honourable mentions of the recent Move Masterpiece contest over on the LittleBigWorkshop forums.

All of these wonderful meisterworks were made with the Move Paint tool from the LBP2 Move pack, look at them shine and sparkle with their pixelated inks!

The Winner

September Girl By natuhito

Although there was much deliberation, there’s no denying that September Girl was our favourite Move Masterpiece entry!
We saw plenty of Sackboy and Sackgirl paintings but what really caught our eye with this particular painting was the way that natuhito had managed to capture pure human emotion and expression into the portrait.
The level of detail involved is simply superb with such an incredible amount of detail and attention put into ensuring that the painting is suitably symmetrical for a human being and that the shadowing and lighting across the whole piece was spot on to help truly bring the painting to life!

Honourable mentions

Alice In Zombieland By Foreva-Dead

London’s Burning By Olmco

Lone Wolf By Haymurus

Scribbled Scenery By Slapp-Me-Do

Starry Night By RedJackal1

The Little Elf By Konfedia

The Thinking Creator By Crasher360

Tree of Hope By BloodSynlol

In this spotlight edition of the Media Molecule Podcast, Kenny, Daniel and Spaff sit down with Mm Art Director Kareem Ettouney to discuss his influences and passions, and how they affected the look at feel of the weird mish-mash that is LittleBigPlanet. We discuss generalities of art in games, games as art, how Mm works as a studio, how you can only be as mad as how serious you are, and Kareem sneaks in his obligatory Beatles Analogy.

After the podcast Kareem attended his art class, where he painted this picture… we include it here as a great example of Kareem’s personal interests, influences and non Mm work. There’s plenty more Sphinx magic for those who are interested, just visit Kareem’s website - kareemettouney.com

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A little while back Deviant Art ran a swishy contest to create some stupendous LittleBigPlanet art pieces, and we totally missed the end of it… Browse through the entries and you’ll discover a real treasure trove of amazing LBP imagery, and the winners are just super duper! Great work deviant arters, lots of <3 from everyone at Mm.

Back in 2006, When Alex, Mark and Dave pitched LittleBigPlanet to Sony, the loveable bag of fluff we all know as Sackboy was nothing more than debug programmer art - a little pink square body and a triangular yellow head,  aptly called YellowHead.  Even at that early stage the character that would become Sackboy had started to emerge, but how did he evolve from that set of simple shapes into the Sackboy we all know and love? It’s been two years this week since LittleBigPlanet was released, what better time than this could there be to find out?

Last October was the first anniversary of LittleBigPlanet, and being relatively new to Mm, I was keen to find out where Sackboy came from. In order to enlighten us all, I grabbed two of the key artists involved with his creation, dragged them into a room and, bombarded them with questions…. Unfortunately we never actually published the results… until now…

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Kareem drew this fine specimen whilst in a meeting… I’m not sure who the meeting was with or what it was about, but I’m fairly happy I wasn’t part of it. It must have been Weird.

Just like an amazing unseen creature captured on film by David Attenborough and his BBC film crew, on a recent train journey to Scotland, Alex managed to sneak up on Rex unawares, and capture this footage of the man at work, filling a page of his sketchpad with nonsense.

Click through to see the final piece, and what happened next…

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When we launched this new web site type place into your life a few months ago, we also published a couple of history articles looking back at the beginnings of Mm and of LittleBigPlanet, which we put together by trapping Alex Evans in a room with a tape recorder, shouting “Go!” and then sitting back for a few hours. This of course means that we are relying on Alex’s notoriously twisted memory, and should take it all with a pinch of nutmeg: we already found out one thing was a total lie, but the rest seems to be quite true!

The first couple of chapters looked at the founding of the studio, pitching the game to Sony,  and building the team up. We left it on a cliffhanger of sorts…. which we will now continue with Chapter 3: Building the game. If you haven’t read the other parts, then I recommend you do so immediately. No not later, now, just do it!

After a fairly intense six months, the small gang of Molecules had been given the green light from Sony to go into full production. Up until now the company had been formed entirely of Lionhead leavers and friends, but now there was a game to make, and some money to make it with, so Media Molecule started to grow.
They advertised, interviewed, hired, all whilst continuing to work on the game…

“It was a weird one, we’d hired key people, but we were all working on such independent things. We didn’t really work together, we discussed together, but there was so much to do that we just… well I could work on a 3D engine, but there was no hope of it integrating with Dave at that stage, Dave was working on a level editor… the PC editor was one of the first things that was made - post green light, we very much focussed on creative tools.”

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Leave a pen and paper in the hands of one of our artists, and give them a long meeting to endure, and you’ll end up with some funky drawings. These sketches seem to be of various people from an art and design meeting, see if you can guess who they are by using the photos on the about page.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the world’s favourite image manipulation suite, and chief tool used in the making of lolcats, Photoshop.
Let’s raise an overly lens-flared champagne glass in celebration!

Computer Arts interviewed a selection of pixel-loving doodle gurus about how Photoshop has changed their lives, including our very own Rex Crowle. Here’s what he did say to them.

What was the first version of Photoshop you used?
Version 5.0 as far as I remember, before that I’d been using Corel PhotoPaint (as it came free with my “Multimedia PC”) and before that, Deluxe Paint on the Amiga.

What were your first impressions?
Initially I was a little disappointed, as it had less plugins than PhotoPaint and no animation features. But, I hadn’t learnt at that stage that plugins are generally pointless, it’s how you use the basic tools that matters!

How would your job be different if Photoshop didn’t exist?
I would destroy a lot more forests-per-day than I currently do.

What do you hate about Photoshop?
The ease of undoing! It can be easy to obsess over redrawing tiny elements to get them perfect, hammering away on the Apple-Z keys, and completely losing the flow of the main piece.

If you had to give one Photoshop tip, what would it be?
Keep it simple and don’t get too distracted by software features. A good idea should still work even if you draw it in MS Paint with a trackball. Although it’ll look rubbish, so don’t do that.

Head on over to Computer Arts to check out all the other similar interviews, including one with our friend Jon Burgerman.

Oh and remember, Photoshop is a powerful and dangerous ally, and not everyone should be allowed to use it.

If you are in or near to Brighton, UK, why not pop down to the Fishing museum on the seafront this weekend, and take a gander at the Pixel Hail exhibition, where art by our very own Jim Unwin and Kareem Ettouney will be on show. We’ll be heading down tonight to a private showing, ooh aren’t we fancy?

22nd May – 24th May 2009 – The Art of Videogames
An exhibition of art from, and inspired by, videogames

For three days, the annex of Brighton’s Fishing Museum will be taken over by a multimedia exhibition of art from, and inspired by, videogames. Award winning videogames artists will exhibit, alongside artists who’s lives are meshed in someway with the world’s largest entertainment industry: videogames.

Private view: the Friday night opening event will play host to the UK and Brighton’s games luminaries as well as artists and members of the press. A mobile phone auction on the evening will give away an exclusive one-off piece of game art, with all proceeds going to charity. The following two days will be a public exhibition with a special kids’ cosplay event on the Saturday afternoon outside the Fishing Museum.

Venue: Brighton Fishing Museum on May 22nd (private view on the evening), May 23rd and 24th (open all day for visitors).