Florian De Gesincourt (Deges Art)

Florain is a freelance concept artist and illustrator from France. He gained his concept art abilities over the course of three years, with an existing knowledge of Photoshop and perspective drawing. He plans to release a series of Youtube videos documenting how he broke into the industry in a short space of time, which will be very helpful for me as an aspiring concept artist. People have been contacting Florain through the video thread, and he has been responding. Due to the fast rising success of the video however, I imagine he will be receiving lots of questions, perhaps too many to respond to individually. I would be interested to know what custom brushes he uses (if any). Sometimes artists upload their brush sets online. On one of the his other videos, a user asked about a water colour looking brush used for the background. Floren replied:

'For the brushes, It must be one I made, or the other one I use are the basic one.'

Perhaps I need not go much further that the basic brushes within Photoshop:

Here Florain uses the canvas rotating function to control the direction and flow of his strokes. I am reminded that when working with pencil and paper on a flat surface, I am constantly rotating my work, sometimes to the point where my subject is almost upside down from my perspective. Perhaps if I experiment with this function in photoshop, I can achieve smoother line work, with more controlled weighting. I know that in another video from http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL/, the artist talked about creating line art with a calligraphy brush and constantly flipping the canvas to control the line weight.

Again, Florain demonstrates in his videos the fundamental importance of values (black and grey) and perspective. I learned in my last academic year that these principles are key, and colour can be experimented with subtly through blend layers. In these videos, other interesting points are made, the freelance artist sometimes including primary photographs in his environment pieces. Also the contsant sketching and life drawing is something I need to push myself to do, which will help improve my observational and perspective skills.

Admittedly, if I am serious about trying to reach an industry level with my art work, I need to be more driven. I need be constantly experimenting with in photoshop, and extending my visual vocabulary. With this third academic year I will really try and push my abilities. I feel I still haven't made that comfortable transition between traditional media and digital painting. This is most evident when painting landscapes, an area I really hope to improve on.