Tim from Team Epic Gamers here, bringing you a special Epic Gamer Artist feature for this week.

You’ll find many surprises from our Epic Gamers. New fans who may be as recent from today, and others who have been fans for over a decade. Cliff “Crotale” Hamby is one of those long time fans, and I sat down with him to get a feeling of what that might be like. And of course, a small taste of what he does as an artist. Say hello to Crotale!

Arukun14: So, tell us a little about yourself.

Crotale: My name is Cliff Hamby and I am powered by Unreal.

A: So I hear that you’ve been a fan of Epic for quite some time. Care to share a little bit about that?

C: I was bitten by the Unreal bug about thirteen years ago.  I moved on to Unreal Tournament the next year and was hooked.  I have been a fan of Epic since then.  I have played all the Unreal, UT and Unreal Championship games, as well as Gears 2 and 3 and Bulletstorm.  And then there is all the artwork.  So, yes, I am definitely a fan.

A: What projects have you been involved with? Are they mainly community involved? Surely you have some stories to tell us!

C: I was part of a mod team for Unreal Tournament 2004 where we were building a PC version of Unreal Championship 2.  Unfortunately, we never got passed an alpha version of the mod.  We had some killer maps, player models and weapons, but the team sort of lost its way and we all drifted apart.

I got the idea to create an Unreal Tournament 3 logo some years ago.  The game was called UT2007 at the time and was still in development.  I had a thread over on Beyond Unreal where I received some outstanding feedback on the logo, so much that I made some wallpapers sporting various offshoots of the design.  A few weeks later, Epic announced that the game’s name was changed to UT3.  One of the game’s leads, Jeff Morris, stated that there were concerns about a possible leak of information since they had been seeing these wallpapers popping up all over the web.  Honestly, I was just an idiot with a dream.

On the day of the announcement, I put one version of my logo on deviantART. The next day, it was taken down, citing that I had posted official artwork as my own.  Someone thought my work was the real logo, even though mine looked nothing like Epic’s placeholder logo.  Hello?  I then went on to create a perpetual Jump Boot mutator for Unreal Tournament 3. I didn’t really have a knack for coding, so I moved back into graphics. I then started making wallpapers for UT3 and the first Gears game.  Before I knew it, my works were hits with other fans.  This inspired me to do more.

A couple of years ago, I heard about an organization called GCON.  They were advertising for a graphic artist.  Not sure if I had what they were looking for, I gave it a shot anyway.  Liam (Hooligunn) took his time in responding, so I figured he was less than impressed.  When he did respond, it was one of the things artists love to hear, “You’re as good as anyone else on the Gears forums I suppose.”  I knew I had my work cut out for me.

Well, as I thought there were going to be other artists on the team, I was surprised to hear that I was it.  I got started making all the awards (about 200 in total) and all the ranks.  Then there were the banners, logos and posters needed for weekly events.  I had so much fun doing it all that I was no longer worried about impressing Liam.   He told me later that I wanted to hire me the moment he saw I had applied.  That bugger!

I left GCON and the graphics world for a hiatus several months ago.  I won’t get into it, but the issue was not GCON related.  My time away gave me time to stop and think how much I want to share my work with the world.  I decided I was not going to stop just because of a hurdle.  I was going to clear that hurdle and move on down the track, jumping each hurdle as I come to it.

A: From what I see, you mainly focus on emblems, symbols, and logos, yet the execution is very effective. Do you have background with graphic art?

C: I have no formal training in the arts. Although I do like painting scenes and portraits, my sketching leaves a lot to be desired. For this reason, I prefer to build on symbology. I guess you could say this is both my comfort zone and my niche. I like to think of it as the latter, as my two most emotional pieces are built totally on symbology.

A: Quite an amazing portfolio of wallpapers you’ve created; from Bulletstorm, Gears of War, Unreal… what inspires you to make them? Where can we find more of your work?

Epic inspires me. Wait, what? Was that too “over the top,” as they say? The games themselves inspire me. The beauty of the art from every game Epic creates spurs me to create my own works. I do create art for other games, but not to the degree that I do for Epic’s games. I have also made a couple of Gears themed audio player skins for Xion.

You can find my work on Epic Games Forums and on deviantART.

Gears of War 3 Wallpaper Thread

Unreal Tournament 3 Wallpaper Thread

Bulletstorm Wallpaper Thread

My dA Gallery

A: The way you create your images look like you work with a 3D program first, then go through Photoshop to polish. Anything you’d like to share about how you go about your process?

C: Although I use 3D programs such as Max, Bryce and Terragen to augment my work, I rarely use them. Almost all of my work is done exclusively in Photoshop.

A basic lineup of my processes:

1. Open huge blank document in Photoshop. Size depends on format, such as poster or wallpaper. I always make the original larger than what my final product is going to be. It is easier to scale down than to scale up.
2. Grab the Pen Tool and start creating rough shapes.
3. Augment with 3D elements when necessary or desired.
4. Add layers, filling in colors and then textures. I may use several layers to get my texturing just the way I want it for each piece in the design. This means at times, my works can contain over 500 layers.
5. Depending on the scale of the work, I may create several project files, one for each major piece of the overall product. I will then merge them together after all the individual parts are complete.
6. Adjust overall colors, levels and lighting for best effect.
7. Make any fine adjustments for that “pop” you want the image to have.
8. Publish work or throw it in the trash.

That’s it in a nutshell.

A: I think that’s all we have for you, Crotale! Have anything to share to your fellow Epic Gamers?

C: If I have any one thing I could say to everyone, it would be this, “Be inspired by the world around you.” Oh, and thanks for all the support for my work over the years!