L’Album

This is a small plug. I have invited some french speaking friends to start a little group art blog.

It’s called L’Album and it only started this week, we hope to have loads of stuff going on soon since we are still in recruitment. COme and visit!

Recruit your dream team

In an effort to recruit experienced key employees, Ubisoft Quebec Studio has launched a recruitment campain like we haven’t seen before. What they are trying to do is get people who have worked in many game studios and met loads of awesome key players to contact them and ask them to be on their dream team. So basically, you get all your old buds who by now have plenty of game industry experience and submit the resumes as a team. If your team gets chosen, they complete the missing parts of the team and give you your very own AAA project.

The studio needs to do that because it has been in existance for only a little over 3 years and while they have experienced developers from Ubi Montreal and other companies, the average studio member has few years behind them in the industry.

Sounds like fun.

Here is the link to the recruitment website: UbisoftQuebecAAATeam.com

100 artists from Journey to The Center of The Earth go unpaid!

Entire press release here.

Article on Cyberpresse (in french) here.

Basically, the Montreal sfx studio where Journey to the center of the Earth was made didn’t pay their employees and freelancers for months and then layed them out andfiled for bankruptcy. This studio is owned by Discovery Communications of Virginia  (owners of the Discovery Channel) and Evergreen Films of Pacific Palisades.

Domain Registry of Canada: a web issue rant

If you live in Canada and have registered a domain name, you might have gotten an enveloppe from Domain Registry of Canada urging you to renew your domain. The letterhead and  name are meant to look official, almost like this thing is related to the government. When you start reading in detail, it never says that they are your current registerer but it presses you to transfer your domains with them to protect them and to avoid losing your domain etc.

This is fear based spam. I cannot imagine anyone knowingly switching to them based on that strategy so I guess they are playing on customer’s ignorance and fear. When you get these spam letters, tear them up.

I’m guessing that there are scammers like this outside of Canada too, I just never received anything from them.

A lead for freelance visual artists

I have recently been researching companies that handle print-on-demand for books. Places like Lulu, Createspace, YouPublish. I had never thought of researching writers who were using self-publishing or using vanity press as a source for freelance work. But there they were! Writers actively looking for someone to make their book covers a success. And the artists who are faster than me and are already cathering to these writers’ pictorial needs.

One such artist is  Natalie Coulam (http://www.nataliecoulam.com/ .) Her site is all Flash which is not something I am very fond of, but I think it contains everything she needs to convince authors to trust her with their book visuals. The only thing I’d add would be a small bio.

Some POD sites, like Lulu, have a forum section. You can also scour writing and poetry forums offering your services. Remember to be polite and not to spam.

I have done that discovery recently and I have not had time yet to try and tap the self-publishing and vanity-press market. I’m just mentionning it as a lead to potential customers. Maybe if some of you have experience dealing with that market, you could let us know, that would be greatly appreciated!

Curly Angel, finished.

Here is the finished version of the Curly Angel.

It was mostly done with raw unber, ultramarine blue and unbleached titanium on top of a burtn sienna underpainting, with a tiny touch of cad yellow light, azure blue and phtalo green in the very end.

Close up