MCGMARK

What’s your art background?

When it comes to art itself I'm completely self taught (with some help from random youtube tutorials at the start), however I do have a degree in computer science and graphical programming. As part of that I had to program a software renderer from scratch that did physics-accurate lighting, reflectance, surface roughness, colour blending, camera perspective and so on, and learning all of those aspects even though it was in a very technical way really helped give me understanding how light works. Coming to painting already having that knowledge was hugely helpful. I wish every new painter would go look up the Oren-Nayar surface reflectance model on wikipedia because it is important haha! 

List a few of your inspirations. 

My biggest inspiration is always other artists and their artwork, if I'm ever feeling at a loose end it takes less than 30 seconds of scrolling on ArtStation to find something that gives me an idea that I want to explore. I'll see something and be like "Wow, what if I did the same composition but by a river instead of a forest path, and maybe swap the positions of the main and minor figure, and change the viewpoint so it's like a fisheye action shot" and so on. By the end of making all these changes you end up with something completely different to what originally inspired you, but it was still the seed that started off the process. I actually have to limit myself from looking too much because I get overloaded with new ideas I want to pursue instead of focusing on what I'm currently working on.

Preferred software/hardware for illustrating?

I do everything in Photoshop with a graphics pen tablet. My biggest hate with physical mediums was always struggling to get the colour that I wanted from the paint; working digitally and being able to get the exact colour no issue is so freeing, so I'm very happy to have made the switch. Working digitally feels very direct for me, there's no pencil to sharpen or paper to crease or brush to clean or paint to spill or other obstacle between you and the art you are making. Though that is a little daunting too since you also have nothing to blame except yourself if things aren't turning out how you want haha!

What are some of your strengths in illustrating and weaknesses?

I think one my biggest strengths is for sure lighting, and working in that zone where the illustration is lit in a believable/natural way but is also pushed just beyond so it's punchy and attention grabbing.

My biggest weakness has always been painting inorganic/manmade structures - any sort of building or object with perfect angles and straight lines means you can't play with it a lot, you can only stretch or squish or bend it so much before it looks odd. And because of that you really need to make sure your layout is solid before you move on, there's little wiggle room to adjust it later as all the angles and distances need to stay consistent and uniform. So whenever I'm working on an inorganic environment there's always this additional layer of stress in my mind wondering if it's going to work out okay or not. Compare this to a natural environment with trees or something where you can easily move and adjust them to accommodate what you're painting at basically any point in the process.

Goals as an artist. Where do you want to be in your art career 5 years from now? 

Hmm I'm not sure I have a specific goal, or at least not something I can put down as a particular yardstick to judge myself by in 5 years. But I'm always trying to do better compositions, I feel like that's the thing I go into a new illustration trying to nail but always come away feeling like I could've done it better. So my compositions will most likely be what I'll be looking at to decide if I'm happy with how much I improved in 5 years time.

Advice for new or aspiring artists.

Spend more time at the beginning in the rough thumbnail stage! Getting the basic shapes and positions of everything down, and then the base colour tones right, is one of the most important factors. If the basics are solid then it's almost like whatever detail you add later doesn't even matter, but if it looks bad then no amount of detail work will save it!