Clearing the past, part 2
The first artists' group to which I belonged was a company called Sypher. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if you've heard of them; these days they're based in Hollywood and are pretty well-known for putting on an elaborate masked ball once a year. In fact I was involved in putting on the very first Labyrinth of Jareth Masquerade in San Diego, but (due to a mean-spirited manager at the Starbucks where I worked at the time) I was not able to attend. Anyway, that was merely the last project I worked on as part of Sypher--what a lot of people might not know about them is that before they found their niche in the Labyrinth, they were primarily an indy comic book publisher, and that's how I came to work with them for a time.
All in all, Sypher wasn't a bad gig (as unpaid gigs go) and nowadays I'm less inclined to think that my lack of success there was due to "other people" so much as my own inability to stick with them as I grew older and (I thought) wiser. But the excuse I gave at the time was that I wasn't being published and it seemed pretty clear that I wasn't going anywhere with them. I went from drawing for Sypher to another company called Bloodfire Studios, created by a couple of disgruntled writers and artists from Sypher who wanted a chance to have their own ideas and scripts heard. When it didn't look like I was going anywhere with them either (I don't even think I lasted half as long as I did with Sypher--but that's all right; Bloodfire is also doing fine without me to this day), I decided to strike out on my own with some like-minded friends who loved just the sort of creativity I was trying to tap into. We became Conspiracy Productions, and explicit in or mission statement was that if any of us were ever approached for a "real job" in the art industry, we'd take it and never look back.
We were pretty successful for a bunch of kids with no experience and practically no money. We got to publish three titles, exhibit at Comic-Con for a few years in a row, and generally act like rock stars while we waited to be discovered by the actual rock stars. I learned a lot about comic book self-publishing in the 1990s. Our sales methods of browbeating passerby into forking over $2 for a comic they weren't even slightly interested in drew some praise from the panelists on self-publishing. I got to rub elbows with t with my artistic idol Hunter Jackson, one of the creative minds behind GWAR. I even spent a brief period doing concept art for American McGee's ill-fated Oz game (I was canned three weeks into the project because I couldn't match McGee's "Mad Max meets Dune" aesthetic vision-most likely because I had seen neither Dune nor Mad Max-so don't expect to find any of my work for it archived on the Web). Times changed, people changed and moved on, and eventually we all struck out for different corners of the country to seek our fortunes. A couple of my friends got jobs working in the video game industry where they'd always hoped they would end up.
I decided to go to art school.
All in all, Sypher wasn't a bad gig (as unpaid gigs go) and nowadays I'm less inclined to think that my lack of success there was due to "other people" so much as my own inability to stick with them as I grew older and (I thought) wiser. But the excuse I gave at the time was that I wasn't being published and it seemed pretty clear that I wasn't going anywhere with them. I went from drawing for Sypher to another company called Bloodfire Studios, created by a couple of disgruntled writers and artists from Sypher who wanted a chance to have their own ideas and scripts heard. When it didn't look like I was going anywhere with them either (I don't even think I lasted half as long as I did with Sypher--but that's all right; Bloodfire is also doing fine without me to this day), I decided to strike out on my own with some like-minded friends who loved just the sort of creativity I was trying to tap into. We became Conspiracy Productions, and explicit in or mission statement was that if any of us were ever approached for a "real job" in the art industry, we'd take it and never look back.
We were pretty successful for a bunch of kids with no experience and practically no money. We got to publish three titles, exhibit at Comic-Con for a few years in a row, and generally act like rock stars while we waited to be discovered by the actual rock stars. I learned a lot about comic book self-publishing in the 1990s. Our sales methods of browbeating passerby into forking over $2 for a comic they weren't even slightly interested in drew some praise from the panelists on self-publishing. I got to rub elbows with t with my artistic idol Hunter Jackson, one of the creative minds behind GWAR. I even spent a brief period doing concept art for American McGee's ill-fated Oz game (I was canned three weeks into the project because I couldn't match McGee's "Mad Max meets Dune" aesthetic vision-most likely because I had seen neither Dune nor Mad Max-so don't expect to find any of my work for it archived on the Web). Times changed, people changed and moved on, and eventually we all struck out for different corners of the country to seek our fortunes. A couple of my friends got jobs working in the video game industry where they'd always hoped they would end up.
I decided to go to art school.