Details

When I was a kid I saw a job advertised for an artist at a games company.

This was kind of a big deal, in a small rural town where most of the jobs were in factories or warehouses of one kind or another. At that time you were eligible to claim unemployment benefits or dole, on the proviso you were actively applying for work. In the job centre where we’d “sign on” would be listed various menial and entry level positions.

As an artistic kid fresh out of school, this was clearly a very exciting opportunity to see on the board! So I reached out, and was invited to visit the games company offices, a single room prefabricated cabin in a car park. Sometimes in the UK these were known colloquially as Terrapins. Even writing this sounds made up but it’s true.

After meeting some of the team and being given various disks and freebies, all budget Amiga games in the Dizzy / Jeff Minter price bracket, I was given a brief.

My brief was to paint a cityscape, of Neo Tokyo.

I’ve tried to do the maths on this and I think I must have been 16 or 17, as I wasn’t driving yet, and we were fresh into anime: Akira, Fist of the North Star, Legend of the Overfiend et al. First wave mid 90s VHS imports were suddenly huge in our culture of borrowed tapes and games magazines.

I’d always drawn cartoons, all my life, and was comfortable riffing on or ripping off characters from tv shows, games, films, school classmates, often for the amusement of peers, and had sketchbooks full of probably quite derivative or generic beat ‘em ups and animated series franchises just ready for green lighting. We hadn’t heard the term world building then but that’s what we were doing.

The enormity of how important this chance felt, in a small town with kind of none, can’t be overstated. What an opportunity it seemed it could be, an all but first job out of school, and drawing, making art in some capacity, and so close to things I loved. So this is my first commission, although it’s only a test, on spec of course.

Even back then people wanted something for nothing.

So I paused the VHS of Akira in key places, borrowed and copied what inspiration I could, and set to painting a night landscape of Neo Tokyo. Even now that seems a big thing to task a child to do as a test to be honest, but I tried my best.

My Mum bought me some acrylic paints for the test, which I found uncomfortable; drying as quickly as they do, I always found it hard to mix up enough of one colour and would end up with a myriad of tones and muddied hues.

I was a fineliner man, even then, or Berol. The surety of black ink always came easier to me than sketching in pencil.

Anyway, in the week or so it took me to research and paint my acrylic on cartridge A3 cityscape the games company had moved offices, and took a little effort for us to track down.

This sounds like one of those scenes from a tv show when the company who’ve ripped you off have mysteriously cleaned out their offices and moved on, and it was a bit like that.

I’d not been given a deadline date for my test or a forwarding address for the business. We didn’t even know they were set to move. We had no email or anything back then, so it was all a little vague and in a now familiar way I’ve since learned when it comes to creative work, I’d probably missed my window.

Anyway, likely via the jobcentre I don’t remember, we tracked them down and headed over one early evening to share my painting.

In my minds eye the new premises was a gothic ish mansion building, probably a landowners house at one time or another, now converted into various offices.

I do remember the hills of the beacon behind, and I remember it was quite stormy. Maybe one of those British days where the dark greys of a looming storm are silhouetted behind the bright sunlit greens in the foreground.

Maybe I imagine all this. The back light. The gloaming. In my memory it feels like those dreams when the lights aren’t quite bright enough and we are fumbling in the near dark. Maybe all my dimlit dreams are about those same box strewn corridors.

I found my way in, stepping over boxes, the turmoil of a small business having just recently moved, the gloom of late summer early evening.

All I really remember is someone, in maybe an upstairs office, who knows, taking a quick glance at my painting and saying “it’s not detailed enough.”

This entire exchange, interview, critique of sorts, that probably lasted minutes at most, has informed decades of my life.

His words are mostly all I remember, and probably the feedback I shared with my poor proud expectant Mum waiting for me in the car.

“It’s not detailed enough”

I imagine this response and its spectre of accompanying third party disappointment is whats haunted me for years, made commissions difficult, scuppered my idle dreams of an illustration career, a directing career, anything that feels like a brief tends to bring my demons.

The root of so much self doubt and self criticism was probably from some distracted guy barely 5 years older than me, hardly paying attention to the creative precarity of the kid in front of him, unwittingly I guess, absentmindedly.

It haunts me still, and often, as I make such graphic work these days and the level of detail I leave in is an endless source of self questioning.

Anyway, this all came to me in a flash while thinking about some other things, figured it would maybe do me good to share it.