How did you come up with the idea to paint videogame scenery? Was there a crucial moment? Please tell us about it. Well, I’ve played video games since I was young, and just became a painter in the last ten years or so. They tell writers to “write what you know,” so I figured I’d apply that to painting! The crucial moment was probably when I was playing Half-Life 2 and got outdoors and was just struck at how realistic the light was, and how much like real sunshine it looked. Which was the first painting in the Fauxvism Series? And how were the first reactions? The style is different, but the first paintings I made from games were the portraits of Alyx Vance from HL2. I gave them to my friend and ex-bandmate Clive Thompson and he wrote about them: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/07/games_frontiers_0730 The reactions were pretty positive! “That’s from a game?” How are reactions to these paintings in general? Please give some examples. What was the nicest comment and what the most dense? I won’t get into the most dense, as it involves bad language not suited for a magazine, but the best reaction I may have had was from my mom, in a way. I’ve been painting for years now, remember, and this batch were the first she really liked. How do you choose/find the places in the games? Do you play the games first and remember the best spots or do you go in the game and walk around just to find a beautiful/paintworthy scenery? It definitely starts from playing a game – I’ll pick up a game I’ve heard was good and as I’m playing it the first hour or two, maybe I’ll decide whether I think it’ll be good source material. I’ve never started playing a bad game just to get to where I can take some pretty screenshots. I usually just play the game and then go back to save points and wander around to take the screenshots. I might save a couple on the fly as I’m playing, but they’re two different activities and saving screenshots interrupts playing! What makes up a good videogame scenery? Is it different from a good real life scene? Not really! The only difference is that there are antlions or radroaches in the game scenery. There are generally accepted conventions for what makes for a good composition, and I tried to apply those as I picked what to take a screenshot of. Also, in this round of paintings, I was especially looking for scenes that mirrored those of the original Fauves – hills and houses, docks and boats, etc. And when I saw that I could take a screenshot in HL2 that mimicked a Monet, it made me pretty happy. City 17 Depot is similar to his Arrival of the Normandy Train: http://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2006/1/9/13824/20576/8?mode=alone%3Bshowrate=1 Are some games better to paint than others? Why and how did you choose the ones you did paintings from? I picked games that I myself enjoy playing – that’s, after all, the best way to see most of the scenery! I’m a huge fan of Team Fortress 2 and just went back into City of Heroes. Some are better than others, definitely. Doom 3 would make for bad paintings, unless you were really into blood-soaked dark hallyways. How long does it take to finish a painting of the Fauxvism Series? It depends on a bunch of things, really. Before I even pick up a brush, I have to go through hundreds of screenshots, find the perfect scene, and crop and edit it in Photoshop. Then there are the wood-panel supports, which I make myself, sawing wood, clamping and gluing, etc. The actual paintbrush-in-hand time is around 5-20 hours. Do you paint while the game is running or from a screenshot? I print out a screenshot on my cheap little color printer and paint from that. Have you ever had to fight enemies in a game to clear a scene you wanted to paint? Oh, all the time. If I’m flying around taking screenshots in noclip/god mode, I may have them in the screenshot, but if they’re small I just Photoshop them out. Have the interactive nature of a game ever disturbed you while painting? How do you deal with that? I wouldn’t say it’s disturbed me, no, because I work from screenshots. But I’ll occasionally be painting and want to get back into the game and give up for the night and go back and play! Is it difficult to reach the places from where the scenery looks best? Please tell us how you choose the best vantage point and how you get there. As I mentioned above, sometimes I’ll walk around, and sometimes I’ll enter cheat codes to fly around, if they’re available. The fly mode in Fallout 3 is excruciatingly slow, for instance, so I just walked around. I’m working on gathering screenshots from Bioshock, though, for my next round of paintings, and ghosting around outside of the tunnels and such is pretty beautiful. Have you ever seen something in a game you wanted to paint but it wasn't possible? Why? Well, I have seen scenes I don’t have the talent or technique to reproduce. I’m kind of sloppy and cartoony. But someone with the skills of Peter Paul Rubens could do some wonderful paintings from Fallout 3. http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-landscape-with-a-shepherd-and-his-flock Do you want people to recognize where the depicted scenery is from? I really wanted these paintings to stand on their own, apart from the fact that they’re from video games. And then if the viewer’s a gamer, and recognizes the area, it’s an added bonus: “Oh, that’s a nice picture. Hey, it’s from Fallout 3!” One of the TF2 2Fort paintings was bought for a wedding present, with the note “Congratulations Brad and Lisa! Lisa, enjoy the painting of a covered bridge. Brad: shhh.” That’s exactly what I was going for. As you offer to paint something from scratch, would you paint game sceneries people suggest to you? Oh, I have been – I received quite a few commissions after all the fuss around the first batch of paintings, and have a bunch of them lined up. I’ll be busy the next couple of months painting games! I can always paint more for myself. Someone wants a painting, I’m happy to be the guy painting it. Please tell us about your background. Are you an "professional" artist? What do you do for a living. Well, I’ve been doing art for money for about 10 years, but I’ve also been a published author, a book editor, a doorman at a bar, and a web-agency information architect. I went to school for graphic design, but took one painting course. So I’m largely self-taught, but my graphic design skills come into play every painting, as do computer-based tools like Photoshop. With this round of paintings I’m going to be busy enough with art that I’ll take a few months off from book editing, so I guess for the next few months I’m a full-time professional artist. Where you from, how old are you? I’m from New Rochelle, NY, just outside of Manhattan, and I’m 42. As you mention "Just think of me with my blue smock, sun hat, and luxurious beard in front of an easel on a hill in Fallout 3" on your website, is it really like that? Do feel free and sucked into the landscape of the games? What is the main difference from painting outside on a "real" hill? Bugs? Sunstroke? I’ve never actually painted outside on a hill, to be honest. I live near Phoenix, AZ and it’s 43C outside today. Please let us know about your hardware setup. What consoles/pc do you use, what kind of TV and soundsystem (Do you keep the volume up while painting?)? And if the hardware setup is in any way important for your work. I am years behind the cutting edge. I use a cheap quad-core refurbished Dell and a 19” LCD monitor a friend gave me when she moved, with a wireless travel mouse because my old one broke. The speakers are bottom-of-the-line with a subwoofer that’s way too loud so everything sounds too bassy. I just play on the PC and on my DS, though I haven’t tried painting any DS games yet :) None of it’s really important at all. I can see what the game looks like, which is all I need. The hardest part was tweaking my $50 Epson NX400 printer to print what I’m seeing on screen. I paint in another room, and sometimes crank the music, but I get annoyed having to deal with shuffle mode and like to listen to audiobooks while I paint, oddly enough. The two parts of the brain don’t interfere, somehow. I must recommend the audiobook of World War Z, by Max Brooks. A great tale of the Zombie War, read by a cast of professional actors. Are you an avid gamer? What games do you like? I’m usually pretty broke, so I don’t try a ton of new games—I’ll tend to pick something up after it’s been out a while and I’ve heard rave reviews about it. I tend to the FPS genre, I suppose, though I have a soft spot for word games on the DS and the Scrabble clone Lexulous on Facebook, and some DS RTS games. The two most-played games for me for the last couple of years have been Team Fortress 2 and The New York Times Crosswords on the DS. I’m in the beta for Champions Online, and I have to say it looks great but still feels a little clumsy. I’m happy with City of Heroes/Villains for now. Which game impressed you from an artist perspective? Which one from a gamer perspective? Artist perspective, maybe the landscapes in Fallout 3. The lighting and rendering make them look like the Rubens paintings mentioned above. TF2, from a gamer perspective. The updates are fantastic, the official blog is hilarious, and the voice acting is perfect. I love Valve and hope that they find me and adopt me and raise me as their own. How would “your” game look like? Well, it would be much more nonsensical than most. French chefs with knives for hands fighting giant coelacanths in the Roman Coliseum in a sphere in space, that kind of thing. Far, far too many games work so hard at depicting THE GRIM FUTURE OF WAR. I like things that make less sense and have some humor to them. Have you ever worked on a game yourself or are planning to do so? I’ve talked to a few indie game companies about doing artwork for games, but nothing’s come of it yet. I would LOVE to work on games. Developers, get in touch! Jamesbarnett.net! Please feel free to tell us something you really want people to know about your paintings and/or the process of painting them which was not covered by the questions above. To be honest, I didn’t expect nearly the amount of attention these have received. I thought it was a good idea, and think I did a pretty good job of painting what I saw in my head, but I didn’t expect that people would be talking about them in Russian and Japanese and Finnish and languages I can’t even recognize. I figured I’d get on Kotaku and get a couple of nice emails, maybe. It’s been nuts, and I’m thrilled. Oh, and yes, I do commissions and ship to Germany. Send an email!