EGX Rezzed 2019

Last year I had the pleasure of attended EGX Rezzed, hosted at the Tobacco Docks in London, UK. When I was there I had the opportunity to play up and coming games from well established game companies, to smaller indie companies, along with being able to speak to industry professionals, and even managing to acquire a portfolio review.

The portfolio review was curated by Creative Assembly and I started off by talking to Emilie Rinna, a concept artist for Creative Assembly specialising in prop design (weapons, vehicle, etc.). Although she was not a character designer, she was able to give me crucial feedback on my portfolio website, she highlighted the fact that my website didn't scream 'concept artist' and told me that in order to make my website more fitting for the job role I wish to go into, I would have to change the website pages to group all my character art work rather then separating them into 'Personal Art', 'University Art' and 'Industry Work'. So following her advice I changed my website pages to 'Character Art', 'Environment Art', and 'Miscellaneous Art', making my website look more professional and suitable for my chosen career path. Emilie further said that my personal art works were a lot stronger than any of the works I had produced for university work so I should place the personal work higher than the rest of it.

After reviewing my portfolio, Emilie focused on my character designs, she said to improve I needed to create more informed character designs; she gave the examples of if the character was to change clothes, what different outfits would they wear?, What kind of items would they use/carry?, etc. This prompted me to look into creating more informed character designs. She then pointed me in the direction of a colleague of hers, Dan Sweeney, who is a senior character artist at Creative Assembly, for further feedback on my character design work. Dan then critiqued my work and was able to give me further important feedback to help improve my drawing skills; he told me to go back to the core fundamentals of drawing as parts of my work were lacking in those aspects, hindering me from creating more professional and intriguing designs. Along with pointing out the improvements that needed to be made, he then gave time to demonstrate what he was explaining to me so that I knew exactly what exercises I needed to do to improve, furthermore, he pointed me in the direction of various online resources I could use to practice and utilise what I had learnt.