A man of my own favoured art, hoisted up high with it from 14 years of experience, 12 of those being in video game art but mainly character art. 2 years ago he went freelance, focusing more on illustration. I personally had a good connection with Neil and could understand his mindset and passion very well as I’m sure many others in the room did too especially those of the artistic nature.
I think for the majority he successfully conveyed that ‘good advice to us students that I’ve seen so many people fail to do in a presentation before. Whether this is purely an artistic mentality or not, I’m not entirely sure but I feel the general message Neil tried to put across to us students was that in order to succeed you must enjoy whatever it is you choose to do, and through that you will have the ability to truly progress. The other ways he advised us all to succeed is to keep good time management, still being a rather ambiguous form of advice, I think he understood that his success has become second nature and to convey that to another is little more than challenging at the best of times.
As Neil Roberts was describing to us all his child hood passion, and how he drew since he could hold a pencil, I was enthralled with his every word. It was amazing to see how much I could relate myself personally to everything he described within himself, seeing myself as a younger version of himself. It was also interesting to see his views on entering the industry. To some a possibly controversial thing to say You don’t need education or grades to get into the industry, if your good your portfolio speaks for itself, which as a general view I couldn’t possibly agree with more, I hoped that this kind of message spoke out just as strongly to everyone else who attended the same lecture.
With so many years of skill and experience under his belt Neil’s work had obviously progressed constantly throughout his career, we got to see work as early as his childhood colourings to his modern day contract work, in which we could all see the obvious interest of spaceships, lasers, soldiers and other forms of sci-fi within all his work. His childhood inspirations he told us of were Judge Dredd, Flash Gordon, Blake’s Seven, Knightmare and many other of a similar era, I could see how these influences resonated throughout all his work. Working a little at Codemasters a while back in his career, on projects such as Mirco Machines, Colin Mcrae Rally and Downhill Mountain Biking although he didn’t specify what parts he designed. These are all classic titles with a consistently successful company who have been around for years now. No doubt Neil was very proud to have worked on projects as far back as that. Some of his other works were for numerous book and comic covers, with numerous amounts of these being for the British science-fiction comic weekly, 2000AD.
Below is a link to Neil’s portoflio:
http://www.skinnyelbows.com/
After having a quick look you can see how his work often uses very strong and bright colours, combining them in a high contrast, high definition and effective manner to create consistent masterpieces. As Neil told us he had skills in both 3D and 2D, if you look through his work you can maybe see how his use of 3DS MAX in particular has really made his work pop off the page, which in my opinion gives him that cut above the rest. I was very grateful to gain the opportunity to meet a veteran of the industry i hope to enter in the near future and I wish Neil the very best for the future.
Thank you for reading!
By Jack Lightfoot, a level 3 student in Interactive Gaming.
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