Jeff Kunze is a master of the half glove style of art drawing. He also hates cheese.
How did you get started doing digital art / game related art?
I had worked as a freelance illustrator for years, so I’d done a wide array of different types of projects. I often had to figure out the best way to find a solution to a certain problem the client was facing. This experience along with teaching photoshop, illustrator, drawing and animation gave me extensive knowledge of some of the programs and techniques we use at Blue Frog.
What kind of work did you do before coming to Blue Frog Gaming?
Pretty much any kind of work I could find to make money. It was interesting doing such a huge variety of work but sometimes the business side would frustrate me. Clients complaining about prices or wanting work for free. I’ve always loved drawing humorous sketches of people and animals, so I would sometimes make my own work by doing t-shirts, greeting cards, etc. Some of my samples are below:
What are some pieces you’ve worked on at Blue Frog Gaming?
I worked on Casino Tycoon, Hearts, Spades, Hearts Multiplayer, Polar Puzzles and Stardrift Empires. I’m proud of the level of detail I achieved on Casino Tycoon after having done the images in Illustrator and not photoshop. It was also fun doing the occasional logo design for games like Hearts, Hearts Multiplayer and Spades HD for iOS devices. Some of my samples are below:
What is the biggest challange you’ve faced in the art you’ve done at Blue Frog Gaming?
Trying to help teach the other artists here how to draw! Just kidding, I work with some really great artists so it would probably be trying to keep up with them and bring my work up to a new level. Also, hand drawn animation is always a difficult challenge, but in games you need the character to start and stop in the same position, which adds even more difficulty.
Another challenge is just keeping all the pieces looking consistent in their look to each individual piece. For instance, we have a design for a ship called the Athena in Stardrift Empires and we need to draw and paint the ship at different angles for various mission illustrations and it still has to look like the same ship. We can change some stuff and we’ve always half joked about how that can add an element of realism to it by having subtle differences in the paint on the ship or slightly different panels on the body. Sort of like the difference between a car from this year being slightly different from the same model of car from a few years before. I actually ended up sculpting a model of the Athena in clay which came in handy as reference for us. We’ve also done a few VERY rough models in 3D programs.
What’s your favorite game you’ve worked on at Blue Frog Gaming?
Probably Polar Puzzles. I was primarily doing the drawing of the various characters that I really had a lot of fun with. I probably had 150 different penguin characters drawn, we were looking at a lot of them and figuring out what we liked and didn’t like. Then I went back and drew the main character in about 20 mins. It was like he drew himself after all those other sketches and the discussion about him.
Anything else you’d like to share?
It’s been really great working here at Blue Frog. It’s given me the opportunity to do the best work of my career up to this point and I attribute all of it to the great work environment and great people. It’s laid back but at the same time we all work hard to make great games. You can tell everyone here loves what they do.
