Talk w/Benedict Campbell
July 27th, 2006Benedict Campbell is a professional CG artist. This covers a lot of things such as illustration, graphic design and photography. He has worked as a commercial advertising illustrator for many, many top clients. He has also had his own exhibitions and done a lot of editorial work.
So tell us a little bit about your background and how you became a CG artist?
I started more than 20 years ago in commercial photography. I worked in large photo studios doing mostly car photography. When I was younger I had the dilemma of pursuing either fine art or photography, I decided to become a photographer because I thought it would be more fun. When I worked in the studio it was one of my jobs to help the set designer set up large sets. I got more and more into set design and it became my job to come up with the concept of how the sets would look, this was mostly for car photo shoots.
Through the late 80s and into the early 90s I carried on with photography but I tried to incorporate twists. One of the twists I did in the mid 90s was to start painting real objects so that when they were photographed they looked like they were painted, this kind of broke me away from other photographers and I got a name for doing that. The idea was that when you were looking at a photograph you thought you were looking at an illustration and then on closer inspection you realise that it might be a photograph, it was basically about creating something different and that’s how I got into doing special effects.
People started asking can you do this, can you that. I’ve always been experimenting with different sort of looks, I think about nine years ago I had a job co-directing and art-directing a perfume commercial and that was the first time I’d actually seen 3D being used. They were using 3D software to build the backgrounds to the sets and it was my job as the art director to sit in with the software guys and tell them how I wanted things to look. When I was watching them working I thought that it would be great fun to have that much power, I could build huge sets way beyond what could he physically built in a 14 or 18 ft studio. So I started dabbling in 3D software. The fist program I used was a program called Bryce. For about a year I just practised at it until I was happy that I could get a photorealistic result. I outgrew Bryce and one day when I was at a show I met up with a company called Maxon who were (and still are) making a software program called Cinema4D. For them it was quite early days and their programme was quite simple, which was a good thing because it made it easier for me to get my head round it. So I carried on trying to get the kind of photorealistic, big sets, cross between a Stanley Kubrick and Dr Strangelove or a James Bond set / 2001 Space Odyssey with a bit of the Jetsons thrown in, look I was trying to achieve.
Both my parents were architects and I grow up in a very design conscious world surrounded by a lot of 60s iconic furniture and I wanted to bring that back around 10 years ago. At the time my American agent said that there was no market for it as the look was too unreal and too edgy. Now the style is very commonplace, companies like Apple Computer and IKEA have helped popularise that very sleek, glossy 60’s look. So for the last nine years I been doing a mix of commercial advertising, photography, and using the computer as an illustration tools whether its 3D or 2D.
Can you tell us about the latest project you have been working on this last week which combines both 2D and 3D elements?
This was a commission from Red Bull who seem to be putting a lot of money into Formula One at the moment, it was basically an illustration to let people know that Pink Floyd, or at least the people left in Pink Floyd, were going to be playing at the French Grand Prix last weekend. So what they wanted was a Formula One take on the Dark Side of the Moon album cover. They chose this album cover because it’s probably the most iconic Pink Floyd album cover and also one of the most iconic album covers ever made. When they first came to me I was slightly worried that they might want to take it in the direction of a photo realistic 3D version of the original album cover. Luckily the art director is very good at commissioning illustration and he said basically, what they wanted was something very close to the original cover but with a twist. When I thought about it the obvious thing was to make the rainbow coming out the right side of the prism into a racetrack. Often the first idea is the best idea (See sketch 1 on the right.) Idea number two was very close to the first one, just with the cars coming out of an unbent track. Number three is there because the art director said it would be nice to get the shape of the French Grand Prix circuit in the illustration but that idea was luckily throw straight out because it would have looked horrible. Sketch four is very close to the final thing. The art director agreed that it should be between sketch 1 and 4 so I knew they were thinking on the same wavelength as me. If you work with people that think alike it makes the whole process a lot smoother. One of the golden rules I apply now is I don’t work for people I don’t like. Life is too short to work for people that don’t know what they’re doing. There are lots of people in the industry who just want to hire you as a technical drawer to just put their ideas down and it can be quite a torturous process because they often don’t know exactly what they want and the finished piece ends up being a compromise. By talking to them before I take on a job I get to know if they are the type of people I want to work with, and my agent is pretty good now at letting me just walk away. If you’re not careful a bad client can cause a job to drag out for like three weeks. So say they commission a £1000 illustration it can start to cost you money as you are unable to take on other work. It’s good when you start to build a relationship with certain art directors, it can be really fun, they know how you work, you know how they work, and it can be really rewarding. But it takes years to build up a network of people you like to work with. The big thing is just to be really careful who you work for.
So going back to the Pink Floyd racetrack illustration…the designers were undecided between sketch one and four but were generally happy with the ideas. This second image is a basic rough I did to show what it might look like with the colours and also what the whole image might look like in the context of a magazine cover. It is basically a cut-and-paste-up, the car is a 3D car that I’ve bought from an online 3D model store and I quickly whacked down and rendered. It is not financially viable for something that is very generic like a race car to model it in 3D from scratch. If it was a stylised vehicle I would have modelled it myself as I do like modelling. The prism was airbrushed in Photoshop and the racetrack was modelled in Cinema4d, I put the pieces together in Photoshop to create a quick mock-up for the designers. I like to do a quick mock-up like this because after this stage things start to get more complicated and I like to make sure the art director is completely happy so I do not have to make time wasting changes later on.
Moving on to the final image I took the 3D model of the car and stripped it down to makea little bit more generic so it wasn’t recognisable as say a Ferrari or a Renault. Keeping with the original design of the album, I decided that the prison must stay dead centre…and trying to stay inline with the minimalist style of the album cover I went for a simple gloss black finish to the cars. The most amount of time was spent on the cars and the racetrack. These were the only two elements done in 3D and I used Cinema4d. The prism was airbrushed in
Photoshop and I used a lot of noise to get a look very close the original. The biggest problem to overcome in this assignment was the colours; there are some very tricky colours in the rainbow. The orange and the purple are the trouble, the purple is a nightmare because it touches the turquoise, and in CMYK (which is still the way 80% of my clients want illustrations) this creates interference where they touch, so I had to play around with this quite a lot to get it looking just right. What I and a lot of other people I know do to minimise these effects is to work in Photoshop in RGB but with the CMYK view on. Nearly every illustrator I know works like this.
What would your number 1 tip be for aspiring CG artists or illustrators?
There are 2 strong things that come to mind…never design on a computer, always sketch first. A lot of people, often out of laziness just start on a blank screen and this tends to suck a lot of creativity out of the finished piece. Starting on paper first also ensures that you are going to tell the computer what to do and not the other way around. One of the things I carry quite close to me at all times is my little sketchbook, it is a much more dynamic and natural tool than the computer and it is important to keep things as fluid as possible in the beginning.
Tip two would be that if you use any form of graduation in digital art (like a gradient) that is produced by software…either in a 2D or 3D application you almost always need to add some form of noise or grain to stop banding from occurring. This is usually just a CMYK issue for printing presses but will also sometime show up when printing from an RGB image to an inkjet printer.
I’ll put one more tip in which is more of a generic one. Don’t chase other people’s styles, it is more important to develop the way you are most comfortable working. Your own style should basically be…YOU, do whatever comes most naturally to you. It doesn’t have to be complicated, I know some very good illustrators who have a very loose style. Looking at it one way if your style is loose your probably going to make more money because you can take on more assignments as one illustration takes less time. There is an energy with looseness, the more contrived images are the more lifeless they can become. I am on the edge with that because my images are very contrived so I have to be very careful not to lose a lot of the life of the original sketch.
What can we expect to see from you in the future, you have done exhibitions in the past, are any more in the pipelines?
In order to keep yourself growing as an artist I feel you have to always push your own boundaries and if all your work is commissioned it can be quite mentally numbing so you have to work on your own projects. I am just finishing off a series called Skin and Steal, which are basically people with pieces removed and robotics replaced. They are a study on how far you can take the photo real look so that it is almost uncomfortable to look at. I am also just starting a new project that is a deviation on that. Last year I worked for Triumph Motorcycles and I got quite attached to the designs of the bikes. So I have been making vehicles which are a cross between humanoids and machines. They are very tongue in cheek. I have been studying a lot of customised motorcycles and vehicles and coming up with a slightly comical, but slightly lush look on future vehicles.
Is this work heading towards another exhibition?
Maybe, if I get enough of them that I am happy with, the worst case scenario is that I just use them for promotional purposes because they are quite eye catching and people will talk about them.
You can see more of Benedict’s work by visiting his website: http://www.benedict1.com/
