Scott Robertson graduated in 1990 from Art Center College of Design with honors and a B.S. in Transportation Design. Over the years Scott’s clients have included Nike, Bell Sports, Mattel Toys, BMW subsidiary Designworks/USA, Patagonia, feature film Minority Report, Universal Studios, OVO, Black Diamond, Rockstar Games, Sony Online Entertainment, Buena Vista Games, and Fiat. In 2002, Scott founded Design Studio Press, a publishing company dedicated to concept art and design education. DSP's first book, Concept Design 1, collected original artwork by seven of the top concept artists working in Hollywood. All seven artists reunited for Concept Design 2, published in 2006, this time including the work of seventeen guest designers as well. This fall, Design Studio Press will proudly present the first two books in the Drawthrough series by Scott Robertson, Start Your Engines and Lift Off. Available separately, as a set, and as a slipcased deluxe edition with original artwork, each volume collects both personal and professional work from 10 years of Scott’s archives. In advance of the books’ release, Scott has launched a new website, Drawthrough.com, as a resource for aspiring and working concept artists and entertainment designers. Scott is currently the Entertainment Design Program Director at Art Center in Pasadena, California.

Joseph: The focus of this interview is the medium of digital painting in general. I want to get your opinions as an artist, educator, and publisher on the medium and where you see it going. First, how did you get involved with digital painting?

Scott: I got involved with digital painting first doing industrial design rendering – like product renderings of bicycle and hokey helmets, and bicycles, about ten years ago. That’s where I got my start.

Joseph: You work with a variety of mediums, is there a particular favorite?

Scott: No, I like to use a lot of mediums. I am really into process and trying to reinvent the way you create images. I use everything from traditional mediums like pen, pencil, chalk, marker, and even wet mediums, then all the way with the digital tools and also including photography.

Joseph: Is there any software package you like to use over others?

Scott: My preferred painting software program is Adobe Photoshop and to a lesser extent, Corel Painter. In the area of building up primitive shapes I really like what Google SketchUp has to offer. SketchUp is really fun. When you have some drawing skills on top of what you can do with SketchUp, it makes a very strong combination.

Joseph: Do you have any suggestions for software makers? Possible how they should tweak a program or how you would change a program.

Scott: Sure! I have a long list. (laughs) I am one of the beta testers for Painter, so I helped them a little bit with Painter Essentials. I defiantly think both Photoshop and Painter do one better than the other. There are defiantly some nice features that could be added, and I have suggested some. We’ll see what happens in the next few years.

Joseph: Let’s talk about your projects. Are their any particular favorites both digital and traditional?

Scott: Probably, from the industrial design side, some of my favorites were designing bicycle frames for Kestrel. I did a series of digital renderings in Photoshop for them. They went very fast, and fun, and fluid. It allowed me to do a photo real looking frame in a few hours, which allowed me to do many of those in a whole week. Abstract environments are probably the most fun area I like to work digitally. I think Photoshop affords you a lot of flexibility in creating photographs of imaginary places.

Joseph: Speaking of working abstract, on your website, you have a few abstract paintings done digitally. Could you talk a little more about them?

Scott: Sure. The more I work in Photoshop, the more I work in doing digital painting; I think it's less about painting from a traditional sense. I think when you work with digital tools, like Painter, Painter tries to recreate traditional media. I think, when you have the digital tool, it is probably not a good idea to recreate traditional media. Traditional media is already great at what it does. It will never be an original. If you want to look like traditional media, use traditional media. But when you are painting digitally, there are all these cool things you can do which is more akin to photography. For instance when you're working in Photoshop, you can build your images and paintings more like a photographer. The abstract paintings are the start into doing collage of either markers sketches or photographs. Then zooming in and finding compositions much like a photographer would find a composition while traveling through a different land. Then you find those things and you paint back into them, to introduce the light, etc. It's really much more about being a photographer than is about being a traditional painter.

Joseph: Initially, painting was used to describe representational work, and the camera changed ideas of painting. Painting moved into abstraction and often explored for the intrinsic properties of paint. Are the exclusive properties to the digital medium, and see exploration within the medium?

Scott: Yes. There is a group of guys doing pretty fun stuff with custom brushes. Sparth, aka Nicolas Bouvier, has been doing some very cool stuff along with David Levy from Ubisoft out of Montréal. There is a great collective of artists up there. They have been experimenting with a lot of custom brush sets. Here a brush will be 2000 pixels wide and be an entire building or a mountain range. I think these guys are pushing the envelope as far as the speed that conceptual paintings are done. They did he use the “happy accident” abstract techniques but now will have specific brush sets that can be as a whole crowd of people or they have a set of trees as brushes. They're maximizing what the digital tool can do as far as providing speed. By playing with a lot of the brush attributes, making them more random and adding some variability to the stroke, they are creating some very amazing paintings in a short amount of time. They may not be finished paintings but they're great starts. They may use “happy accidents,” but they are purposely shifted towards certain architecture or types of landscapes. That's probably the most exciting thing as seen in the past year.

Joseph: Are there artists that you are looking at that may interest you both for inspiration and as a publisher?

Scott: Ya. Sure. It's all the usual suspects that have taught there techniques on our DVDs. And on the book side, there are a couple artists that people may not know about that not in our catalog as of yet. We are doing a book with Sparth, who does have a book in our catalog, which is almost finished. Probably the most exciting guy is Daniel Simon. You can see his work at http://www.DanielSimon.net. We are going to be publishing his collection of fantasy vehicles. The great thing about his book is the beautifully done loose sketches and then he jumps over the color rendering 2D work to and goes directly to 3D. He has done some amazing 3D models in Alias. He has a collection of a dozen vehicles which will be showcased one vehicle per chapter. This book should be out around Christmas 2007.

Joseph: A lot of artists are going digital. Are they any disadvantages or pitfalls to digital work? What problems do you see in the realm of students from you perspective as an educator?

Scott: Probably the thing that jumps out at me the most is if a student doesn’t have good foundation skills. When they try to fix a ‘happy accident’ painting or if they have a good start, they may have an interesting color palette, usually overcomplicated composition. To then pull it off as a finished painting means that they would have to go and redefine the horizon line, redefine some vanishing points, and tighten it up. I think that’s where a lot of the paintings fall apart. So, if someone is grounded and has strong drawing skills, they can take one of these loose paintings and fix it, tighten it up, and make it something believable. Structures are more solid because they would be lit properly. It becomes evident when someone’s foundation skills are not strong enough to support this other way of starting a painting.

Joseph: That’s good advice. Could you talk a little about the Design Studio Press?

Scott: We started the Design Studio Press in the spring of 2003 with Concept Design 1. This book came about because I wanted to rekindle a lot of friendships I had in school. We had a great class when I was at Art Center in the late 80’s. We had a lot of friendly competition. I feel that we are not getting that friendly competition from our professional lives and we were not pushed artistically. Everything was mainstream genres and not very experimental. We had all been out about fifteen years so it was a good time to invite some of my classmates and couple of younger guys to join us. We started having every other month meeting in my studio where we would each bring a few pieces, just to inspire each other. So we would get together every other month, and I told the guys if we did it for a year and we had enough work that we liked I would start a publishing company and publish the results of those meetings in our first book. That’s how this publishing company got started. Since then, that book has sold out and gone, and we just came out with Concept Design 2 with the same original seven and we invited another seventeen concept artists. As far as the future goes, I want to just keep doing books and DVDs that in 3 categories. We have this artist monograph series with individual artists like Sparth, and Daniel Simon, and myself doing portfolio books that will inspire the next generation of concept artists. We are doing “art of” book like Art of Darkwatch. We have a couple more video game and film books in the works. The third category will be launching with my educational books. Our first book with be Nick Pugh’s plein air painting. He will be doing digital plein air painting in the book called Luminair which will be out this Christmas. So we have educational, individual artists and collection of artists, and “art of” books.

Joseph: Is there any area or theme you would like to see more explored in digital painting?

Scott: There are many, many topics going on. I am really big into experimenting with processes. The integration of photography has been used a lot, but I think there’s a lot happening on what you can call 2½D. Starting with building a quick primitive in a very simple program as I mentioned like SketchUp, and then paint over the top of that, or even using that as an underlay for line drawings, I think there could be more experimentation in those regards. I think what falls apart for most paintings I see are the lack of original design. If people would get out more, travel more, read more books, and start to have more original ideas

Joseph: Build that mental library.

Scott: Ya, build a visual library by traveling or drawing. It’s good to have mentors or people that inspire you, but I’d love to see people push beyond what were doing by really focusing on the original design content which goes back to having good foundation skills.

Joseph: Lastly, what is one piece of advice you would give to someone who is considering a digital career?

Scott: Starting a career in concept design, I think the most important thing to be a good concept designer as appose to a concept artist - I define the two as different because when you are design for a film or game or feature animation everything is built three dimensionally. It requires a different set of drawing skills and a different state of mind. I think its much more akin to industrial design. That’s why so many concepts artists are from industrial design. It’s industrial design with great illustration skills. Someone who is starting out in concept design needs to remember that everything they are illustrating and drawing is meant to be built and that the 2D work is essentially throwaway. It’s really just a step in getting to the final result which is always three dimensional. This is compared to comics or graphic novels where the final result is 2D. Illustrative style is much more important because your final product is meant to be 2D. So in doing concept design, the finished product is 3D. So anyplace you can education in industrial design first, the picking up your illustrative skills second would be very beneficial.


You can see more of Scott Robertson's work at his website DrawThrough.com and the Design Studio Press website.