The Extinct Texture Artist

Long ago, an awkward creature existed that neither fit into the art community nor was fully computer literate. This creature was called a texture artists. Texture Artists happily toiled away their days making art for videos, specifically art to be spoiled to polygonal objects, like characters or environmental assets. I was one such creature. For many years, my daily routine was one of creating brick walls, cinder blocks , old pirate ship planks or dead grass. And for you young whippersnappers that think you can just take a picture of dead grass…we didn’t have cameras on our phones then! If you wanted dead grass in your game, you painted dead grass, even digital scanners weren’t an everyday item in that epoch. There was none of this “push the dead grass button” nonsense. You rolled your sleeve up and took 20 minutes to paint yourself some great looking dead grass!

It was good times! Companies run by 18 yr olds, mandatory game playing time at work and you could make a lot of money with weird art skills.

But like an over partied Triceratops, the meteor hit somewhere around 2001, and the good times ended. Procedural software like Zbrush, Mudbox and Substance can on the market and killed the last texture artist like a Galapagos Tortoise getting run down by pirates.

Good times. Below is some of the work I made for various games.