While I love nothing more than the escapism of being sat at my desk, gaming/streaming the night away, I do miss the creative elements that were once presented to me in such a wonderful and groundbreaking way. This week, whilst playing the glorious War Thunder with friends, I was reminded of exactly that. Seven years ago, my creativity juices flowed in a way I never knew possible, and it all began with Halo.
Halo 3 was not only an incredible game but one that offered the complete package. Bungie, the company behind the franchise, not only gave the player a tool to build rich and diverse environments, but also a way to create stunning imagery. To those in the right hands, absolutely anything was possible. While Forge (Halo 3's environment builder) was an intriguing prospect, I tended to prefer and in some ways excel at the latter, spending hours upon hours, wading through round after round of Halo battles in Theater Mode, looking for the perfect shot of myself, or anyone else for that matter, in the thrones of battle.
I was constantly trying to push myself, experimenting with various techniques from tutorial after tutorial on Photoshop. The moment I touched on the idea of panoramas, I was sold; a scene made up of multiple images instead of just one, essentially giving the viewer a much wider vision version of events, as well as a greater level of detail simply due a larger file size. It took a huge amount of time and plenty of trash-can edits to fully understand how to build these monster sized images, but when it did finally start to click, I was creating what I considered a series of masterpieces back then.
Reflecting back on nearly seven years and I believe they still hold up pretty well. I did a little retouching in Lightroom and Photoshop before posting them here and it was interesting to note just how much I have learned regarding these software packages. Images sent via Bungie.net were 72dpi and seven years ago that was simply just another number. Where clipping occurred in the graphical limbs of the Spartans, I had no clue how to alter, yet since I have now corrected these errors, using a variety of tools that have become second nature. I do find it useful to go back over things, particularly after such a long time, and in particular, when it all meant so much to you back then.
I have always wished to be even slightly promising with a pencil or paintbrush, though that was never the case; unfortunately it seemed someone else got ahead of the line and was offered instead those creative abilities. Thankfully, Photoshop quickly became my way of dealing with hand drawn stickmen and poorly mixed colours; the more images I created within the Halo universe, the more I felt that computer game art was indeed a form of art to be considered. I was soon averaging around twenty single images per poster print and over time my Halo art became much more technical and illustrative, with images seemingly holding just a moments glimpse of a bigger picture and story; the more I created, the more closer I came to fleshing this out.
During the few weeks of the Halo Reach Beta, I ended up spending more time in Theater than I did actually playing the multiplayer. It wasn't a case of testing for bugs or ground breaking issues or even commenting of the state and play of balance, in my eyes I already knew the game was perfect enough, I was simply involved to only craft more works of art. With the graphics in Reach vastly improved, particularly when it came to the customisation of the Spartans and Elites, along with some spectacular environments, I knew after the short time spent within the prequel, I would find it very hard to return to 3; the release of this game could not come soon enough.
Halo Reach was released during the same month as I began my degree. As much as I wanted to continue my epic artistic journey into the Halo universe, I had to prioritise my time accordingly. While I did create a number of new works, for the life of me I can only find a few of them on my hard drives, which is a great shame as with Reach, I began to document my own character throughout some of the stories key moments. If I ever do find these prints, I'll be sure to post them here.
Which leads me to my next project, or more to the point, side-project. Whilst work indeed continues on the trawlers and the fishing industry with a huge update coming soon, I have decided to find as many games that have some kind of 'Theater Mode' and produce hopefully even better works of gaming art. War Thunder has already sucked me in, with a few trial images below which has begun to form a starting point as such. Using what I know now on Lightroom and Photoshop, I hope to convey a sense of found footage with these images; scratch marks, dust speckles, a vintage feel and colour (or lack of). In time I will report back with what I have created but here is a few images to show what I have in mind.
Before I go, I thought I would add this final image. During the time of Halo 3, I began experimenting with a variety of tools, hoping to substitute what I couldn't do with a paint brush with what I seemed to be able to do on a computer. Mainly using the Liquify tool, I created my homage to Cortana. Even today, despite leaving my love affair with Halo ending with Reach - with moving to the PC, I never did get to experience Halo 4 or likely will either with the forthcoming Halo 5 - I'm still kind of crazy mad for this wonderful A.I.
