Beard Clippings

[Patrick Gaumond]

Hello good Daggers! It has been ages but I have finally set aside the time to pop back in after being lured back in from a comment left by Koala man on my Deviant art from a while ago :)  A lot has changed since my last visit, but I'll try to get everything in. I have also taken a gander through the recent sketchbook updates and it's really inspiring not only to see people keep improving, but seeing the persistent participation in this community! I was a bit surprised to see the community still up and running.

TLDR; Life circumstances got in the way and I took a job outside of art for the last 2 years while studying as much as i could muster outside of work. Just about every digital work I've done in that period will be below. I have included some traditional stuff here too but theres a lot omitted as well, if theres any interest I can try to shoot them and upload them here.

Long version below; ( I'm mostly posting here to collect my thoughts, though feel free to read it)

The last time i posted 2 years ago, my dad had been in the ICU for a heart attack he suffered. It was a very close call, but he pulled through in the end and is doing well today, though he's been off work since. Around the same time, one of my cats that I had been raising from a kitten got ill and i unfortunately mustered a large vet bill suddenly that I couldn't pay, and couldn't keep relying on my family to help pay for things. 

To try to pay for it, I sent out my work to every studio that I felt I could work for, replied to ads on reddit and deviantart for small indie jobs, and also applied for a bunch of jobs in my area both art wise and regular entry type jobs (think bagging groceries, stocking shelves, etc). I unfortunately wasn't able to get any of the art gigs i applied for, or was given vague promises of pay in the future after kickstarters... the usual deal. I couldn't accept these in the circumstances i was in at the time.

I also didn't get much luck with about 9/10 of the regular positions i applied for, except for 2! I got an interview at a health food mart which went well, but I never received a call back.. I also applied for a position in a video game QA outsourcing firm. I was reluctant to ever work there, as reviews of QA posts in general, and specifically for the ones where I live made me skeptical to say the least. Despite that, i needed the cash as we all do at some point, so i applied regardless and actually, much to my surprise, got an over-email exam to get in. It went well enough that I got called in for a paid training session soon after.

I honestly didn't know what to expect from it, as it was my first regular job, and in an unconvential career path, but to my surprise it was actually a very rewarding and informative experience. There were some inner demons that I had to learn to deal with, in terms of properly working with other human beings. By that, I mean that it was the first time that i was really working in a team with other people where there wasn't an "adult" presence, so to speak... it sounds childish perhaps, especially to some of you with more life experience maybe, but my experience up to that point always involved an authority figure in the form of a teacher, and it was fairly difficult for a student for example to actually get punished for something in a long term way. Suddenly in the professional world, most things don't fly anymore; employers offer much less wiggle room for small behaviours that may have previously been ignored, and your own career is now at stake, so any and all issues i had had to be resolved. (re reading this, it sounds like I may be a terribly human being or something, but I'm trying to say more that there were certain professional behaviours I lacked more than anything)

On top of this, I was fortunate enough to be placed on a long term project (projects typically last 2 weeks to 3 months, this one was around 10) with a lead who was willing to help me develop my skills in order to move up in QA. I got the opportunity to co-lead some of the testers. This was only an opportunity, not a promotion proper. But I have to say, at first it was pretty challenging. It was easy to get stressed out doing all that all of a sudden, but i'm glad I took the opportunity nonetheless as a learning experience.

Eventually, the managers at the company were looking for members for their "Hit Squad", which is their term for testers sent over to Dev studios to work in house for a time, as contractors. The clients were specifically looking for more technically minded QA, who had some experience working in game engines like Unity or Unreal. Thankfully, the summer before, right before my Dad and cats had their health scares, I had been taking some programming courses from MIT open courseware on Ed-X, and was also dabbling in Unity tutorials and learning about game engines and game design. I never really thought anything of it, as I was just learning this stuff as a hobby, but it ended up paying off, and they chose me to join a senior tester to head over to a newly formed studio where I live.

That studio was EA Motive, which has been working on the singleplayer campaign portion of the upcoming battlefront 2. To keep a long story short, the studio was brand new and was beginning to need QA support, but all the candidates that they were looking at were not yet available at the time they needed them. So we had the odious task of essentially setting up the project from a QA perspective. 

I can't even begin to describe how much i learned from my senior on that project, and how much i learned from the other QA that joined afterwards. Suffice it to say though, that I ultimately applied for a position at  Motive proper (not as an outsourcer) and was given a 1 year contract with them, which just ended about 2 weeks ago. Since the managers were made aware of my interest in concept art, I ended up doing mostly art QA in which i acted as a support for the art teams in VFX, lighting and character modelling/rigging. I was also lucky enough to have a brief mentorship stint with a couple of the concept art folks there, who were kind enough to give me a ton of feedback on my work and even do some paintovers live in front of me o.o

So why the blackout in my posting? Well, earlier in that same summer with all the health scares, i also for some reason decided that it would be a good idea to get into lots of arguments on the internet. Often about trivial game related things, but also sometimes about the great taboo of politics/religion, and often with people whom i considered my friends. I eventually realized it was contributing massively to my stress and anxiety levels, and that I should stop going on the internet, and stop getting salty when discussing potentially controversial subjects. This may sound strange, but after i had experienced what it was like to nearly lose someone, i became a bit of a health nut myself to try to minimize the risks of unexpectedly passing away and causing pain to my family and friends, so i decided to totally blackout internet at the same time to reduce stress levels. I went as far as to enable plugins that completely disable youtube comments, and even changed my facebook password to some absolute nonsense to avoid being able to easily get back on it (easy enough to request a lost password, but the gesture was symbolic more than anything). (also,Somewhat ironically, the tipping point for all this came about after an argument on youtube about the first battlefront game from dice...) 

This was probably the most beneficial thing I've ever done for my own sanity. Yes, i lost some possibly valuable feedback from my peers, and i also lost some of the peer pressure associated with posting online and constantly seeing other artists work, but removing all the noise around that helped me gain so, so much clarity on my self and my own work.

Art wise, since i now i had an income for the first time in my life, i decided to a) pay off all debts, b) be as financially independent as possible (pay for my own things) but still support my family financially(my dad was the main breadwinner in the family, and with him off work the rest of my family needed the financial support) and c) invest a lot into my art education. 

For around 3 months or so i attended Watts Online. i didn't get very far into it, only reaching the head part of the course, but the information and focus on repetition was super valuable. I also enrolled in some courses from Proko and from Aaron blaise, both of whom i had enjoyed their free content previously, but their paid content was a nice addition. And i also bought a ton of art books to look through. I didn't do much studying from these, but i stumbled across some art works that have been very formative and have helped me find myself a bit more stylistically (Previously I had been struggling to settle on what i actually wanted to do. It's still a mystery, but I feel like i have a better direction than before). I also invested in upgrading from a laptop to an actual desktop. If you're still working on an electric potato like i was at the time, please, do yourself a favor and invest in a a new machine! I'm still amazed to this day how much artistic clarity I've gained while working simply to not having to fight against my tools, and have a steady, reliable workstation to use.

The last major thing art wise I have been doing is focusing almost exclusively on imaginative work and on linework, either as a basis for a painting or as a drawing on it's own(almost to a fault). I felt like i got stuck in a rut with the study-apply format of art learning, and it was high time i put my accumulated knowledge to the test. So, a good chunk (though not all) of the stuff I'll post below is strictly from imagination, particularly as they move forward into more recent things. One big drawback i noticed from this is that I feel like I've lost a lot of my patience and ability to render, and going back to study from life or photos is less consistent than it was before. Even with that caveat though, I feel that forcing myself to be able to work largely from memory has been beneficial, particularly at that point in my art journey.

If you read all that, I hope maybe some nugget of info in there was helpful or interesting ( I hope i don't sound too self centered with that huge wall of text, but I feel like those of you who were around and helping out when i was still here deserve an explanation whether you want it or not!) And hopefully, theres been some improvement in here somewhere.

So enough talk! Here's some art :) As nearly chronological as I could get it but i probably mixed up somethings since these were uploaded one at a time practically :C
(PS: Any recommendations for image uploading programs? I need something that uploads in bulk and allows for message-board resizing so it looks nice on the board )















































































































































This one below is actually from late 2016.