PPP3: Chat with Nick Scurfield

I recently contacted a local illustrator, Nick Scurfield. My initial interest was based on the fact that he had managed to get some of his designs licenced as official Star Wars prints.
On further inspection I was impressed with the sheer variety present in his work, as well as his expansice experience. I sent over a few questions and recieved an amaingly thourough response:

Me:
Firstly, could you describe your practice, who are your main sort of clientele?

I was wondering how you got licensed to produce Star Wars artwork? I recently completed my dissertation about Star Wars merchandising, so I am certainly interested in producing official artwork for Star Wars.

Are you represented by an agency? How do you find work?

Nick: 'OK, so I did a degree in arts and design and pretty late on decided I'd like to enter film production. In 2000 I did a couple of free gigs to try and get some experience, creating storyboards on a couple of films that never finished production. After a few months I landed a job storyboarding and concept art for a studio who were creating their first animated TV series. I worked on 3-4 shows over a couple of years until they eventually went under (loong story).

I then started scouting out for freelance work, and secured the odd bits here and there before getting a permanent position as concept artist at a games studio in Leeds. I was there for about 4 years and was taking on the odd freelance contract at the same time. They went under (it happens more than you'd think) and so i was forced to go freelance. I decided that I wanted more control over my work and made a concious choice to stick at it and have been working at it ever since.

I'm now working a sort of permanent freelance contract with a games studio in Leeds called Dubit serving as their Art Director and taking other jobs when I think I can fit them in.

The Star Wars work came out of research I did about the legalities of selling fan art. Basically I couldn't find a solid answer but did discover that ACME archives hold the licence for several studios. So after my initial Little Lukes Destiny image got a lot of publicity online, I submitted it and they liked it enough to licence it and put it out as a limited edition print.

With fan art you will NOT make a living from this. I do it for the love and for the publicity. You barely see any money as they only issue about 12% of the sales royalties to the artist. What it does afford you is publicity and will drive traffic to your sites as it does get shared and reposted all over the place, especially if you're pro-active about sending and posting it to as many sites, social-media groups and twitter feeds as possible.

Games studios are pretty much your best bet for work as they're plentiful and are regularly developing new projects. Advertising agencies will also be a solid source of revenue as they have a fast turn over for projects...

Me:
I am really interested in working for games studios, do you have any suggestions for structuring a portfolio to show to game developers / art directors... what do you like to see from artists?

Often it seems a lot of game artists fall under a sort of house style of hyper-real digital paintings.

I will certainly look more into advertising, as it's where all the money seems to be.

Funny you should mention FX, I rescued 20-ish editions from our college library, as they were going to be thrown out (CDs were all intact)!

I do find it encouraging that there are practitioners out there like you who do manage to make a living from illustration (and seemingly enjoy it), and you have really given me some great answers.

One last thing, do you keep a sketchbook, or do you work completely digitally?

Nick:
Sketchbooks. Yes. Religiously. I have about 30 full ones on my desk. I go through about one every 2-3 months. I keep them for reference. But I draw a lot. Whilst watching TV, when I'm on public transport etc, so I try to keep it at hand. I almost always scan in these doodles as a starting point and this is despite having a cintiq. Most of my colleagues seem to be happy to work purely digitally, but for me nothing is close to replacing the feel of the paper. Yet.

The smaller games studios are primarily making products for mobile (ideally that they can release on multiple platforms), which restricts their products to low-poly 3D or stylised 2D art. Whilst its great to see that someone can produce gritty images of urban warfare and realistically rendered post apocalyptic scenes, they don't help when you're making buzzy bee 12. Target your portfolio accordingly. If you're applying to a studio, look at their previous releases and get an idea for what they might be working on next.

Its surprisingly uncommon to come across someone who has a strong grasp of stylised character work. I think this is down to the fact that people who want to work in games set their sights on concepting Fallout 12, where as someone who is comfortable producing characters for small comic strips wont often apply for games, assuming the studios are looking for someone do concept Fallout 12.

There's different areas of design within the games industry, but smaller studios will want people who are good all-rounders. If you have any experience in sound, motion graphics, UI, 3D modelling or Animation, these will always count towards you. Make sure this information is visible early on in showcasing your work.

Your site is pretty nice at the moment. There's some good stuff on there and you clearly have your own style. One thing I'll suggest is to try keep the bar at the top, on screen, even if you scroll down. When time is short, the ability to click to a different category without scrolling back up through a dozen images is always going to be helpful. With that in mind, possibly consider reducing the size of the title box in order to accommodate more thumbnails earlier on. The quicker art directors get to your art, the better for everyone.

Dubit are well stocked with creatives at the moment and have a couple of regular freelancers to hand when they have any overspill but I'll keep your details to hand just on the off chance.