Interview: CoolSurface.com

We have a real treat this week for all you burgeoning digital artists out there. Digital designers David and Sarah Cousens are the co-founders www.CoolSurface.com, a site that both showcases their formidable design talents and serves up some high quality design tutorials that you really should check out. We have included some links to tutorials within this article but these are only a small selection of what’s on offer over at www.CoolSurface.com . I took the opportunity to ask David Cousens a few questions about his work.

From looking through your online gallery, I get the feeling you’re more than slightly influenced by Comics and Videogames, is that a fair assumption?

Guilty as charged, I’m definitely big on geek culture.  As a kid I loved video games and comics, as an adult I’m exactly the same.  Well my voice is deeper and my stubble wasn’t as impressive when I was a kid but you get the point.  The main difference I find these days is that I don’t just appreciate game play, I get inspired by the different visual approaches games are using these days.  I love it when developers take a bit of a risk; for example Zelda: Wind Waker still looks good to me now, whereas Twilight Princess looks old-fashioned to me (and that’s me speaking as a huge Zelda fan).

I also find that video games are one of the best ways to unwind after a hard day at the graphics tablet.  I’m currently playing Tales of Monkey Island on the PC, Prince of Persia (2008) on the Xbox and my wife/Illustration partner Sarah and I are currently getting near 100% completion on Lego Star Wars: The complete saga on the Wii.  We always play our games together, it’s great to have a wife with the same interests!

Who’s your favourite Superhero?

The person that invented the Wacom Cintiq!  Being able to draw directly onto the screen has made my life so much easier!

When I was a teenager I used to like Gambit from the X-Men the best, but he’s been slowly ruined over the last 20 years and has become far too whiney(little known fact: Gambit used to be cool!).  I tend to like characters that are a bit cheeky and sarcastic -can’t think why! – so I always quite liked DeadPool for his irreverent nature.

You have a great portfolio of characters here. When you are trying to think-up a new character for a client, is there a process that you follow? Are there any resources that you tend to rely on again and again?

Thanks very much.  Creating characters can be either very quick or very thoughtful.  Some characters I’ve created have been the first doodle off the top of my head which is one of those rare occasions where everything just falls into place design-wise, which is great as you can pretend to be some sort of uber-genius as opposed to some very lucky moron!

However normally when making characters for clients it’s best to really think about the character before you start drawing anything.  What sort of personality do they have?  Are they happy, sad, angry or depressed?  Do they have a job or any hobbies?  How old are they?  Are they physically fit or lazy?  Where do they come from and where are they going?  Once you start asking yourself these questions you start to come up with subtle things to add to their design that people won’t notice initially, but it will help them understand the character.

As far as resources you should look everywhere!  Not just the most popular current trends (in fact you should avoid them if you can, otherwise your designs will start to look a bit generic).  I look to old fairy tales and mythology, historical events, periods and people can be a good way of alluding to something in a character.  Have you ever noticed the Empire characters in the proper Star Wars films all have bit of a Nazi/SS aesthetic to them?  It’s a quick way to let the audience know you’re dealing with oppressive bad guys without having them wear a t-shirt that says “Bad Guy” which would be silly.  Although that could work nicely in a comedy…

If I were to try to give one decent piece of advice to people designing characters, don’t add something just to be cool, try to have as many elements as possible have a purpose.  Have you noticed that in 2008/2009 people were designing characters with tribal style tattoos just because it was cool at the time?  They’re already starting to look a little dated because the tattoos have no meaning to the character.

For the younger or less experienced designers reading this article, do you have any tips or advice for them?

Try to learn as much as possible.  I made the naïve mistake of only learning about comic pencilling because that was what I wanted to do and figured I didn’t need to know anything about colour, or Photoshop.  It really limited me as a young artist and my work is actually quite painful to look at now, despite the fact I thought I was amazing back then (when in reality I was pretty dire).

When I started to branch out into learning other things, my art progressed by leaps and bounds.  As an artist, the second you think you know everything is the second you should reconsider what you’re doing.  Never stop learning!

Also, never swear in public forums and always be polite with everyone you deal with.  Good manners go a surprisingly long way!

As an established artist, who do you look up to and respect?

I think I tend to look up to people that are either remarkably talented like Drew Struzan, who has a remarkable amount of skill, or people that aren’t afraid to share their knowledge.  It sucks when you see a good artist that won’t share their techniques as they just seem afraid that they will fall behind if anyone else finds out their secret.  I lose a lot of respect for people like that.  I’ve always believed that if you know something, you share it as not only does it help other people out, also it forces you to raise your own game and keep improving.

There’s a huge amount of up and coming talent appearing on sites like DeviantArt. Is there anyone you’ve seen recently who has really caught your eye?

Nobody is springing to mind, but I think “up and coming” talent tends to hover under the radar of most people until the new person suddenly “levels up” and make something that’s quite attention grabbing and then they start to make a name for themselves.  That’s normally when established artists start to take notice.

Being “established” is partly a state of mind in the art world.  I read a great piece of advice that essentially said “Don’t say you’re an aspiring artist as people will never take you seriously.  You’re either an artist or you’re not.” Which in it’s own Yoda-like way is very true; people treat you the way you act.  When I listened to this advice I got over my fear of rejection and that little nagging voice that said “I’m not good enough yet” and started to act like I was ready to join the big bad illustration world.  My first commission in the industry came within a week of not acting like I was “aspiring” anymore.

We’ve put a list below of tutorials that people can access via your site. Which would you say is a good introductory lesson to get people started in the www.CoolSurface.com tutorials?

I’d say the “Broken Link” tutorial is the most helpful tutorial overall as it tells you a lot of design hints as well as the technical Photoshop tricks.  I didn’t have a word count on that one so I got to share anything that came to mind whilst making it.  It gives you an insight into how I approach both the technical and conceptual sides to my images and explains things pretty well.  Plus it’s rammed with silly jokes which always makes things go more easily.

That’s it for now. A big thank-you to David for taking the time out to answer some of our questions and for providing us with some great examples of his work. If you’d like to hire David or Sarah for any freelance work or if you’d like to look into any of their tutorials, you can visit www.coolsurface.com/about-2 for more information.

You can follow David on twitter: http://twitter.com/DavidCousens

Below, we’ve included some links to some of the choice pages of their site for you to check out.