Mark McGlashan / mcgmark / 34
I have always loved making artwork, and was always drawing things when I was a young kid. My first experience with working digitally was doing pixel art in MSPaint when I was about 12, and I dabbled with different mediums, physical, digital, 3D etc. through my teens but never really took it seriously and I definitely can't claim to have been very good at it. I stopped in my late teens, but almost exactly a decade ago in 2015 I picked it back up again with the aim of really trying to improve. From there it took about 3 years before I was able to start picking up professional work!
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!
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.
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!
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.
My favourite is the Silkling anima illustration. I really like the second two manifests as well, but specifically the first one with the fruit in the foreground, the market in the background, the divide between the darker saturated foreground and much brighter background, plus the little semi-transparent parts where you can see through - I'm really happy with that one!
My favourites will probably always be my Final Fantasy 9 fanart mainly because that is possibly my favourite piece of media ever. Any time I look at them it makes me happy, particularly the one of the crew catching frogs, and the one of Vivi in Black Mage Village. Very excited to do more FF9 art as I have many more planned!
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.
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!