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Lee Dotson
From Hellgatewiki.com
Official Flagship Studios Biography
After being pulled from the warm bosom of incubator F23-00107A, the fetus to be later known as 'Lee' was placed directly into a popular culture stimulus program. Consisting primarily of Raffi Christmas specials and horror flicks, such a regiment served as the perfect primer for his next evolutionary step towards becoming a video game artist extraordinaire.
'Lee' has been slaving away for his Zentradi masters on a variety of titles over the last seven years including Alice, Anachronox, Fakk2, Unreal Championship 2, and several other unannounced or ill fated projects that he refuses to talk about lest he be punished with the bad touch.
Media
See Lee Dotson photos in the image gallery.
Lee's Artist Interview
In February 2006 Lee took part in Gamespot's So You Want to be an Artist game artist roundtable interview. The following quotes come from that article.
| Name: Lee Dotson
Current Company: Flagship Studios Best-Known Works Include: Anachronox, Alice, Unreal Championship 2 All-Time Favorites: Doom, Star Control 2, Disgaea, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Final Fantasy VII Now Playing: World of Warcraft, Diablo II All-Time Favorite Art Styles: Art nouveau, the pre-Raphelites, surrealism, film noir All-Time Favorite Artists: Alphonse Mucha, Katsuya Terada, Yasushi Nirasawa, Kenneth Scott (id Software), James Jean, Brian Ewing All-Time Favorite Artworks / Media: The writing in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, the cinematography in Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie |
How did you become a game artist?
I've always loved drawing and have spent countless hours doing art and programming for my own games. In high school, people would ask if I was going to art school, and I'd look at them like they were crazy. I grew up in a small town in Georgia in a blue-collar family; to me, those sorts of jobs were what real people did. So, it never occurred to me that making art for games was an option until I came across a course catalog for the Savannah College of Art and Design. I think I must have read the course descriptions for their computer/sequential art programs more than 100 times, because I simply couldn't believe that there was a place where art was a real course of study and not just an elective.
Was your first love games or art?
I'd have to say monsters were my first love. My father took me to see American Werewolf in London when I was four years old, and even though Mom pulled me out of the theater after the first really gory death, I've been hooked on them ever since. From there, it was just natural that I got into games and comics, since they generally had lots of monsters.
On my own time, I generally like to work on character portraits that use a lot of clean lines, soft colors, and sweeping design elements to help fill out the composition, like you might see in a lot of art nouveau pieces. I usually do these pieces as a change of pace from all the flayed and gibbering masses of flesh that constitute many video game monsters. To me, they're just different aspects of my personality, and I really enjoy working on both for what they are. I don't think you can really appreciate something horrific if all you ever see are horrific things--just as you can't appreciate beautiful things if all you ever see are beautiful things.
Tell us about your creative process.
I work on a lot of different aspects of the art pipeline, so what my day is like can vary a lot depending on whether I'm modeling, texturing, doing concepts, or collaborating with programmers on a way to accomplish a needed graphics technique.
Regardless of what it is I'm doing, I usually start by digging up references. So, for example, any time I start texturing the suits of armor for the Knights Templar, I fill one of my two monitors with pics of stained glass windows, priestly robes, and other sources of religious iconography to give me a point of reference. From there, I'll go into Zbrush and do a quick sketch over the entire suit to figure out how all the ornamentation is going to fill the body. I then check to make sure that each piece features something interesting, since the player will be picking up all the pieces of the suit individually. Once I've determined my overall layout, I'll go into Photoshop and start polishing the sketches, while periodically popping back and forth between Modo, Photoshop, Zbrush, and our in-house tools to inspect and adjust various aspects of the finished product.
How does your art make it to the final game?
Making art for games is all about compromise and revision and, sadly but occasionally, starting over from scratch. A good example of a compromise that I make is in the portrayal of female sexuality in video games. I've always hated that male characters are typically covered from head to toe in layers of armor, while their female counterparts are equipped with nothing more than a chain mail bikini. It doesn't make any sense if you're even vaguely going for realism, and from a design perspective, it's been so overdone that the characters become completely forgettable. I've had this argument with many other developers over the years, and while some share my view, others do not. Many times those people that haven't agreed with me were the project lead or art director, so I've had to let the argument drop and do my job, because that's part of being a professional and part of working on realizing the team's vision of the game, as opposed to just my own.
Fortunately, starting over doesn't happen too often, but on more than one occasion, I've modeled/textured a character that was based off an approved piece of concept art, only to find out that the character was really supposed to be completely different, long after the work was completed. Sometimes things will also get cut for reasons that have nothing to do with the art process at all, but rather because of scheduling problems in other parts of a project. While working on Anachronox, I had textured more than 80 monsters that never made it into the final game!
Please cite two games that had a very effective art style.
I think with Unreal Championship 2, we did a really good job of preserving the colorful feel of the classic Unreal Tournament [from 1999] while giving the overall art style a bit more consistency and a higher level of overall polish. All the visuals were so over the top. Everything glowed, shimmered, and distorted to the point that it was almost like being in a sci-fi candy shop, which I thought was a lot of fun considering how many games are set in the "oh so grim" future.
Shadow of the Colossus has got to be one of the most beautiful games I've played recently. They did a fantastic job of giving the player a sense of scale when looking across grand vistas and at the game's many lumbering and flying colossi. The game really uses the whole screen as a composition, instead of just throwing together a lot of characters that are cool individually. In SOTC, it's the mountain that's important, not the rocks that make it up. I think their restrained and well-placed detail really helped them pull that game off.
What's most exciting and rewarding about being a game artist? I'd have to say that the collaboration with so many other talented individuals is really my favorite part of working in the games industry. I can't count the number of times I've walked over to someone else's desk and been so blown away by what they were working on that it made me want to work even harder to make sure everything I was doing was just as cool. It's also great to have people you trust, who can bring in an outside perspective when a piece isn't really coming together or when there's just that "one thing" that's missing. I definitely think I've learned far more from my peers over the years than I did in art school, and as long as I can keep learning, I'll probably keep doing game art.
What are your thoughts on game art and technological advances?
I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks that I see a lot of people tripping over as we transition into the next generation is that we've been so limited in what we can make that the question has always been "can" we do something and never "should" we do something, or even "does it even matter to the game?"
Game art should be the servant of the game itself, and when we're creating that art, we should really be focusing on what is going to have the most impact on the player. I've seen a lot of artists get so fixated on making the most intricate, high-poly model ever that they lose sight of what the asset in the game is meant to be. If it's a mailbox, then it doesn't need to be the most intricate mailbox the CG world has ever seen, unless that mailbox is really important to the game. If you're working on a real-time strategy game, does it really matter whether or not the units have normal-mapped pores or facial expressions that you can barely see?
There's also the question of how detail affects the player's ability to discern what's important in the world and what's not. When working on a painting, you guide the viewer around the piece from one area of interest to the next. If motion of the piece is the important part, then looser strokes are used, because that's what the viewer should be focused on. In this way, we can choose to either confuse or help players move through the world by having the most interesting objects in the world be the ones that are the most important to them.
Any advice for aspiring artists?
I think the two biggest suggestions I can give to any aspiring game artist out there would be to be persistent and to be willing to go where the work is. I was rejected at least a dozen times! Three rejections were at Ion Storm, where I was incidentally finally offered my first industry job. Every time I got rejected, I threw out the bottom 80 percent of my portfolio and made a new one that took into account any criticism I was lucky enough to have gotten from my last rejection. When I did finally get that job, it was in Dallas, Texas -- a place I'd never been and never particularly wanted to live, but that's where the work was. Without that break, I'd never have made it to any of the other places I've worked.
