Collaboration

At Avalanche, on rare occasion, a single concept artist will take a piece from start to finish. Most of the time though, we are bouncing concepts back and forth between multiple artists. This makes posting stuff or using it in your portfolio more difficult, but there's no question that it results in a better final product. The second artist so often sees things you don't, or brings in a sensibility or idea that modifies yours in interesting ways.

We did several big pieces early in the project for internal marketing purposes. Ben Simonsen and I worked back and forth on a couple of them.

Here's what Ben gave me to work with.

So I did this to it.

Then Ben took it back and turned it into this, which now has the proper tone we were going for.

This next one I started. After I worked on it a while I gave it to Ben and he changed the background to the racetrack in there now. Then we ran out of time and had to call it done.

I like the top image so much better, I'm thinking the moral of this story is to have Ben do the initial drawing whenever possible. But that's what is great about working collaboratively, other people make you look good and vice-versa.