About
thedenrei posted in on June 27th, 2006
I am the artist at Stolen Notebook, an independent game company in Madison WI. I am currently enrolled in UW-Madison seeking a degree in Art, philosophy or Japanese Language. I spend a great deal of time in the UPL, where I met a number of people interested in games. A few of us saw that we had complimentary talents and began working together on game projects. We formed Stolen Notebook, LLC in 2005. Our focus has been on developing well engineered software and tools for game development.
I work part time in the UW Computer Science Lab where I oversee the minor day to day issues of our information backup system. I love music and Rachael Leigh Cook. I use gVim7, Maya, Photoshop, and a bit of Zbrush when it fits the task.
My favorite artist is Hyung Tae Kim.
I like his balance between realism and fantasy, his extreme detail in a style which usually strives for simplicity. The only thing he adheres to is what strikes his fancy, frequently drawing from multiple time periods at once and dressing characters in completely rediculous attire. I tend to not like his female characters as much. He leans too heavily on their sex appeal. I don’t have a moral problem with super sexy characters, its just that these are unsuccessful at being sexy. If you check out some of his pencil sketches, he has some really top notch female characters there. I wish he would follow those styles more in his main work.
but I dont like his games. At all :-/. Games I do like are StarCraft, Street Fighter Series, FF series (I hate actually playing them, but they’re awesome anyway), Guilty Gear, all Marios (Original Smash Bros – there are probably fewer than 30 people in the world better than me, and I play with 3 of them). I don’t play any games which arn’t multiplayer. Even in the case of FF or Mario, I don’t ever play them by myself. I like games that you can play for years and years get really good at.
My favorite game designers happen to all be Japanese. Shigeru Miyamoto, Tetsuya Nomura, and Yu Suzuki. One of my strongest aspirations(which drives my day to day efforts in japanese language class) is to have the opportunity to work with/under and learn from any one of these giants someday.
I also used to play a lot of Games Workshop games, which are more fun than video games in their proper setting. These games have been the strongest impact on my game design philosophies.
I think most of my posts will concern the progress of the art for whatever project stolennotebook happens to be working on, and my related thoughts. And there will be pictures.