Paul Richards in my books is a great concept artist, he’s a
guy that realises that while reality is all good, it’s more about the feel that
the characters, environments and objects give off than being stuck to be absolutely
confined to reality.
And the best place to see his work is from the games that he
has worked on, having been at studios like Vigil Games, Raven Software,
Blizzard and now 343 Industries, he has had the chance to work on Darksiders,
Jedi Academy, Quake 4, Singularity and even the latest Wolfenstein, of which he
has brought his varied styles into play.
But what are his styles? For one if you look through his
work on both the blog and his portfolio site, you’ll see that he has 2 main
styles, a cartoon style, where he exaggerates the proportions of characters and
objects, but he also has a clean, digital style that’s similar to the work of
draftsman of yore. He mixes and matches his styles depending on what is needed,
for example he will over exaggerate some the human elements of a character, but
when working on the armour he may make it nice and clean. Described as Pixar
but filthy by a friend of mine, looking through the more cartoonish work that
there is a similarity to the work by Pixar, although I doubt Pixar would do
naked chicks in their films.
Tools wise Paul is more of a sketch and Photoshop kinda guy,
he’ll use various pencils and markers to do sketches, which he’ll scan into Photoshop
to do a final. But not all work is done from a sketch; he also does a lot of
work straight into Photoshop, where he will add highlights and shadows to a
mass of a mid-range colour to create shapes and objects.
And while his work includes lots of monsters, robots, guns
and swords, he does do a large amount of pinups, of which most you’ll find in
another blog called Babe Lab, exceedingly NSFW, it contains various images and
tutorials based solely on how to draw the women.
Now for those of you who do a lot of art, or are interested in
getting into the games industry then there are a couple of features you will
want to look at on the portfolio site, Thumb War and Hints and Hacks.
Please note that both the portfolio and the blog contains
NSFW material, the portfolio has less of that, while the blog is practically
crammed with the stuff.
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