Handpainted Diorama Breakdown
Years ago I was contacted by the Stylized Station channel asking if I would create a tutorial for them. I didn’t want to make something new because that would be a lot of effort, so instead I did a breakdown of my Sand Trap piece and went back through to show the different stages of how it was made. I really hope this is useful to any artist wanting to make handpainted 3D stuff. Please excuse the horrible mic quality and bad editing, I didn’t know what I was doing and kinda thought they would be fixing that stuff on their end but they didn’t…
A disclaimer about this experience:
Some time after I made this video there was some online discourse about the Stylized Station channel using and not crediting other artist’s work (which is obviously shitty), and that led to some contributors talking about not getting paid or feeling like they weren’t compensated fairly. Let me just state that I received nada for this (and wasn’t expecting to get anything). If I had made a tutorial from scratch specifically for them, that would be different, but I was perfectly happy giving this away for nothing but some precious exposure (I don’t think I got a single follower from it lol). After knowing what has come out I wouldn’t work with them again, but I don’t regret the opportunity to share some of my knowledge with the internet.
Another juicy piece of inside info I haven’t talked about before is this diorama wasn’t made for my portfolio at all, this was actually an art test for a studio I won’t name. This must’ve been during or just after Covid lockdown times, I had no work and this studio had a position for a 3D artist that was fully remote. I got through the rounds of hiring to be asked to do an art test. Unpaid of course. I spent a few days on it and went to extra effort to make it stand out. Must’ve worked, because I got to the final interview with the studio leads and it was a fluff conversation where they claim they want to get to know you by asking exhilarating questions like “What makes you get out of bed in the morning?”. I thought the interview went okay but the conversation was very dry and I didn’t have great answers for some of these first date ice-breakers they were giving me.
I didn’t get the job. When I emailed their HR back to ask why (which is always a good idea), the response was “Your application and art test were great, stronger than any other candidate’s, but the studio leads just thought you didn’t seem passionate enough and sounded burnt-out.”. First, let me say I don’t show outward excitement for much outside of playing with dogs and eating chicken parmigiana, so I feel like that was unfair. Also this goes back to my previous post about working on other people’s projects, but how passionate do you really expect me to be about making your same few uninspired F2P mobile games designed just to milk money out of undeveloped brains? No one is actually passionate about that shit, even the founders of the studio stopped being passionate about their games the moment they made that their number one priority. I’m sure I didn’t miss out on much, in the years passed that studio has continued to slide down a slope of mediocrity and won’t be long until they fade into obscurity.
This turned into a bit of a rant, but yeah I was pissed off putting that much effort into an unpaid art test for a job I didn’t get. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about art tests too, maybe save that for another post. At least I ended up doing something with the piece.
