Hello! I’m Nathan (she/her), and I’m from Berkeley, California. I’m an IMGD BA major, though I might inadvertently minor in CS if my classes wind up that way. I decided I wanted to do some flavor of art professionally two years ago, but before that had been creating illustrations to go along with my creative writing, comics, and aimless world building. I don’t honestly know how I ended up wanting to do art for video games, but my guess is it’s been a slow burn since playing Valiant Hearts in 8th grade and deciding immediately afterwards to get my first (very dinky) Wacom tablet.

My art has been influenced by historical illustrations for most of the time I have been doing it, with my most recent predominant influence being early 1930s science fiction newspaper comics (after mid 1800s magazine advertisements, Mucha’s posters, and the Borderlands franchise). As such, I do mostly 2D physical illustrations, though I usually color using an art program. I have done some 3D modelling and animation as well, though I have only taken one class on each of those, and as such don’t have a huge amount of practice.

The biggest improvement I want to make is to get faster at everything. I am a slow physical artist and even slower digital one, which has caused a lot of problems in past art classes. I don’t really have a problem with the amount of time I spend doing art, the biggest driver for me to get faster is mostly so I can create more detailed and polished pieces in the same amount of time.

I also took up sewing my own clothes 6 months ago, which has proven to be a tumultuous process as I do not like following directions, and I sew using original 1930s and 40s patterns which assume a comprehensive knowledge of sewing techniques that I do not have, as I only taught myself to sew in March. I’ve also recently gotten back into creative writing, which has been a lot of fun, even though it’s largely been for classes.

I’ve made two “games,” a D&D one shot and a RenPy game, both for classes here. The one shot was entirely created by me (and the website for it is linked with the other art I’ve done), and is an adapted form of D&D 5E as to be set in a retrofuturist spaceship. The RenPy game is currently unfinished, as I was the lead writer as well as the sole artist, and the scope got accidentally expanded to significantly larger than what could be reasonably completed in the time we had.

The games that have inspired me are incredibly varied, and all are important for wildly different reasons. One of the first is the aforementioned Valiant Hearts, which was the first story game I played outside of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and is what inspired me to start doing digital art, as well as think about games that weren’t large, 3D open world titles. The game White Night is also quite inspiring to me, though almost exclusively from an art direction–I never actually played the game, and the story isn’t especially inspiring, but the black and white cell shading, the noir-inspired use of lighting, and the unconventional fixed camera angles were all very cool. I also found the Outer Worlds quite cool from an artistic standpoint, as the combination of early 20th century retrofuturism and advertising tactics lead to a world that I thought was fantastic (though I agree with Noah Caldwell-Gervais on his take on the somewhat lacking story).

Game(s):

D&D One Shot: https://nb8627.wixsite.com/the-diseased-ship

Physical Art:

Digitally Colored Art

The clothes I’ve made this year:

Animations: