For those of you that don't know, I do accept paid commissions. Any subject matter. I prefer if it has something to do with Eve Online, but I am a full-time freelancer and always looking for more work. Illustrations, logos, graphics and even some video work are always interesting to me. I'm trying to get a new career path going and any potential work is always sincerely appreciated. Which is why I was happy to have my friend Jin'Taan contact me about some pieces he was thinking about getting made. His idea was an interesting one that I believe more and more of us older Eve players might want to consider. Our memories.
Because, at the end of our individual run in Eve Online, what do we have? Our memories. And, as I discovered working on this project for Jin - those memories are rapidly fading away elsewhere. For example, a few of the battles he wanted to feature were extremely challenging to find anywhere. And these were 2014 and before. I found it quite amazing how challenging it can be to dig up old articles, or Reddit posts, or videos about older events inside the game. But eventually we managed to land on three pieces for his collection.
The challenge for me was to re-create the events and design the pieces to reflect the memory of each moment. Not the reality, the artistic interpretation of the memory. Which is two different things. I didn't want my work to look like a screenshot from the day, but rather what you would imagine the day looked like when you remembered it. If that makes sense?
Which I believe I managed to accomplish with these pieces. The third one, the one at the top of this post, was meant as the out-of-game version. Memories of Jin's work on the Alliance Tournament and other projects. That was challenging. And I went through a bunch of concepts before I landed on the portrait treatment. The portrait itself was also challenging for me, as I honestly haven't done a lot of portrait work for the past few years. I wanted something more recent and used the recent Fanfest Tournament as my inspiration. Sadly not a lot of reference for that one either. So I had to use about a dozen blurry video images to build out a reference and then essentially paint the image in photoshop. I'm really super happy about the final result.
This weekend I'm getting these printed and sent off to Jin to enjoy and hang in his home. And hopefully remember his time in game and out fondly for years and years to come. I'm honored to have had a chance to work on these with him and learn more about these memories and bring them to life. This was a fun project and I hope to have a chance to work on more projects like it in the future.
Thanks Jin'Taan. And enjoy.
