All the colors of Andrew Jones, Creative Director at Massive Black.
CGSociety traveled to Montreal, Canada last September to attend the ADAPT Conference. Over this coming year we will explore some of the superb talent presented at the event.
Continuing the series of ADAPT 2007 speakers, we spoke with the dynamic concept artist, Andrew Jones. Jones, a master user of Corel, is the Creative Director at Massive Black, co-founder of ConceptArt.Org, and innovator of an art form he calls “Shape Sifting”.
Andrew Jones always knew his interests were in art, and when he was sixteen he began his studies in Alla Prima painting and fine art portraiture at the Boulder Figure Academy in Colorado. He would practice his passion at the Pearl Street Mall, a beautiful area with a courthouse, parks and shopping. “This park had a heavy constituency of runaways and homeless, very colorful people, so I would go to the park and I would draw portraits of the homeless and runaways."
He would draw perhaps twenty portraits a day, and excelled at his craft enough to gain the interest of tourists who were willing to pay him for his work. “Once I realized that I could make money from drawing people, then that was the end of my food service career. It was a huge shift and I knew I wasn’t going back.”
Making the world his inspiration, Jones traveled around Europe drawing portraits and supported himself in college by drawing portraits on the beach. “To date, that is still some of my fondest memories. You work all day and you really feel it. I used to use this red chalk and my hands and pants would be covered in it. It was a good hard day’s work.” Jones has been true to himself and had followed his bliss, and in return, his bliss has followed him.
His first true career job came to him between his junior and senior year in the form of an internship at ILM. For three months he got his first real taste of the industry and professional workflow and met his mentor, Iain McCaig. Armed with this knowledge from “an amazing place like ILM,” Jones returned to his final year of college to digest what he had learned and prepare himself for his next step.
After graduation, Jones looked at all his opportunities and selected a position at Black Isle Studios “because it gave me the opportunity to hit the ground running and really be drawing.”
He was attracted to the artists that worked there: Kevin Llewellyn, Jason Manley, Vance Kovacs, Justin Sweet, “a lot of artists I really admired. I chose Black Isle because I knew I would be surrounded by artists I really respected and a lot of skill sets that I wanted to adapt into my work.” However, though drawn to the talent, the location in Orange County, Los Angeles was just not where Jones wanted to be.
After three months, he returned to Europe to draw portraits and after a period of regeneration, accepted a job as a Concept Artist at Nintendo’s Retro Studios working on the Metroid series. “Metroid was a really special game to me; when I was around eleven, that game was really important at that moment in my development, so to have that opportunity to bring that game to a new generation was a real honor.” He worked on five Metroid games in as many years, plus several other titles for Nintendo and NST.
About four years ago, during his time at Retro, Jones and co-worker Jason Manley teamed up to launch ConceptArt.Org. They had attended art school together where they had their first experience being a part of an artistic community. After graduating they each went their separate ways, but “found we missed that feeling, that community.” ConceptArt.Org was started just between those friends, a single location for a collection of portfolios. To increase the interactivity, Manley suggested adding a forum where other artists could register to post and share their art. It grew slowly at first, then suddenly took on life, and now boasts over 85,000 users.
They began to ask, “What are we doing? After sitting here making other people rich all day long I guess we could focus the effort to making ourselves rich at the same time.” That was the birth of what became the studio, Massive Black.
Originally it started as a collective of four or five freelance artists working from different locations. “We made Massive Black look like a huge entity, even though we were just artists living around. Jason was even living in his garage.” Their success not only allowed them to move to a single studio but demanded it, and the continuing growth has recently allowed them to move to a much larger studio in downtown San Francisco with a studio in Shanghai, with works to develop additional studios in Asia.
“I think we are unmatched as far as quality goes, because the guys just get better and faster day by day, the quality increases, and we’ve become more efficient, and keep getting more clients and more diverse work, so it’s been really exciting to see them grow. There’s been nothing the team can’t handle, and handle it with such grace and expertise.”
The crew at Massive Black is so strong, it’s allowed Jones the freedom to explore new avenues, one of which is an innovative twist he calls digital live painting, or Shape Sifting. “Last April I had the opportunity through a friend of mine, Lorin Ashton, who is San Francisco’s #1 underground DJ for the past five years. He was on this big underground communication west coast tour. I had already worked on some album cover art for him, and he thought I could do some airbrushing or something.
He didn’t really know what he wanted me to do, he just wanted me on tour. The tour was going to be about a month long.” It was an unpaid gig with only room and board and living on a bus, but was going to be an adventure. “I was going to have to do something that was really worthwhile to me, and really exciting.” Jones realized often concerts have a traditional artist off to the side working on an easel with acrylics or oils, but the size and the medium had serious limitations, so Jones came up with the idea to plug into the projectors and do live digital painting. “It just seemed like it made a huge amount of sense. It was exciting, but it scared me, I had never done this before and had never seen it done.”
They spent the next month at different venues, and Jones was hooked. He added a guitar strap to his Wacom tablet, and now it rarely leaves his side. He even flies with it as carryon luggage.
“After the Bassnectar Tour I went on a tour of Japan for a month with a DJ called Bluetech. In Northern California we have a series of big underground music festivals where between 2000-5000 people show up and renegades take over these natural areas, forests and mountains, and have this amazing music that plays all night long. So this summer I’ve been touring all those different festivals, I’ve been to Europe for the Glade Electronic Music Festival. It’s been weekend to weekend. I just finished a festival called “Symbiosis” I was painting for four days at that festival, then I hopped on a plane and came to ADAPT.” He painted at one of the ADAPT parties, too.
“In a way, all the live painting I was doing was just practicing for Burning Man.” Burning Man is an annual experimental art and music festival in what is known as Black Rock City out near Reno, Nevada. Every year tens of thousands of open minded creatives come to camp in the barren desert and over a week build a city of art together, sharing ideas and experiences in a climate that is a challenge in itself. There is no commerce allowed, and it is a leave-no-trace environmentally aware event.
“It lasts for a week like a giant sand painting, and then it all fades away afterwards. It’s a great opportunity to be whatever you are, whatever you want to be, and share whatever you can share.” I have personally attended two of these events and I have never seen anything else like it. I always return utterly exhausted and completely regenerated.
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