Posing times vary between 3/5/7/10 minutes, depending on the goodwill of the class leader at the beginning of each session. I think they have longer poses in other sessions, but we never had more than 10 minutes in the saturday's classes. Which fortunately was enough for me to try some painting ; trying to get a decent picture with so little time was a really good experience, it pushed my decision making and reactivity while drawing.

There is also plenty of good old pen/paper croquis, but no scanner.. I should take pictures of them and try to get something visible out of these with crazy levels and masking, only once the laziness to do so will extinct. someday.

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This is me drawn by my production manager Young Ae Hwang! Wonderful skill she has^^

So, Attica! This project was a big part of my life, actually not only mine, but I'll give my point of view here.

Everything started two years ago, when Fahim, Larson and I were often meeting at Georges Melies school to work on Harold and Matthieu who was working on his Student Film. We had been big fans of artbooks for a long time, and especially the ones from Design Studio Press (scott roberston) like the Skillful Huntsman or Alien Race, books about concept and creative process only. So we asked ourselves "why not taking our art to the next level? Let's make a book too!".

We wanted to make this project a participative thing, where people would come to enjoy their passion for drawing and learn from each other. We created a story, based on Fahim & Larson's works, talked a lot about the how and when. And tried to get confirmation from everyone to come 1 month during the summer, and make some epic pictures based on the story we had. So after several months of preparation, and with our science-fiction story of two sisters and many scary aliens, the production was ready to start, end of July 2010.

I also had a personnal goal in the making of this book. After working as a 3d artist for one year after school, I really wanted to go back to drawing and become a concept artist. So this gave me a really good training, and fortunately I was hired as a concept artist a few months after.

Everything may not have gone the way we were expecting, considering the process itself and the actual presence of everybody involved. But it was our first, mistakes had to be part of it and in the end, we still made it and were very proud of what we had achieved! 

When we finally had all the images and all the texts put together, we had to make the actual book! It took almost one year for us to make this materials come to a final print, through lots of layout stages. Each of us were very busy with our work so it was hard to hold meetings and get it done. But we finally saw the end of this project! And that moment when we could hold our first book in hour hands was awesome, quite a joy and relief. And also a revenge on all our unfinished projects!

Anyway, I hope we'll have the occasion to make another book very soon!
And a big up to eveyone who worked on this! Go check their stuff out!

Fahim   Larson   Matthieu

Julien   Loic   Guilhem   Marine

Here is a selection of my work on Attica :

To anyone who would be interested in the book, I am sorry that we only did enough prints for the ones involved, but you can send me an e-mail to get a free pdf version! (also, texts in the book are in french^^)

Although I usually prefer to make more "brushy", "painterly" stylized artworks, we (the concept team) used lots of photographs in the concepts. The reason for that being that the game visual goal is photorealism, as in all Tom Clancy's games. The near future world depicted in the game has to look and feel real to make it believable.
The other reason, on a practical aspect, is to speed things up. Most concepts were done in half a day or one day, which would have been really hard without photographic bases to start from. Anyway, I hope to be able to show more of this project soon. GRFS should be released in a few months.

If you missed the ones I already posted, go to the end of this post : Practice practice

You may also check the personnal works of the concept team members :
 Loïc Bramoulle
Constance Beillard
and the art director Xavier Marquis 

NSFW