A brief history...

After completing high school in 1990 I did a year's National Service in the South African Air Force. On completion I got accepted to study further at the Pretoria Technikon where I graduated with a National Diploma in Fine Art (Painting). I stayed on to complete my Degree majoring in drawing, for which I received a distinction.

Towards the end of my studies I received a PC (Pentium 1 166mhz), on which I began to teach myself Photoshop.

At this time I also started making custom levels for Duke Nukem 3D and the original Quake (I'd always wanted to make games ever since I got my Commodore 64 back in 1985).

In 1998 I started working at a small design/print company. In the process I began to teach myself 3D, starting off with Truespace. Finding this package too limiting at the time I moved on to 3D Studio Max 2.

For several months in 2000, I gave evening classes after work, teaching several students 3D Studio Max.

Early in 2000 I left the print company to start my own small multimedia business, with my fiancé and a friend, specialising in web site design, CD-ROM presentations, small animations, and general graphic design. During quiet times I would do contract work, specialising in web design and 3D Animation. Things started to get too quiet for my liking.

Towards the end of 2002 I saw that a local Game Development company (I-Imagine) had several openings available. I applied as a 3D modeler and texture artist and was accepted. I handed the business over to one of the partners, as I could not be working at two different companies simultaneously.

In late 2004 I was contacted by one of the directors at Eurocom to see if I would be interested in working there (hadn't even sent my resume out yet... hehe). I was promptly flown over for an interview and offered a position as an environment artist on Batman - Begins.

After Batman - Begins I went on to work on Ice Age 2 - The Meltdown. Then at the beginning of 2006 I moved back to my old Batman team as a character artist to work on my 3rd title, a yet undisclosed next-gen project!

Following the cancellation of that project, I went on to work on 007 - Quantum of Solace (PS2) and then helped out on Disney's G-Force for PS2 and Wii.

I left Eurocom September 2008 to move down South where I now work at Endrant Studios. I have just completed work on the multi-player portion of Wolfenstein.

Well after being made redundant from Endrant Studios on the 20th of August (2009) after the studio had to close down, I started a new job on the 14th of September in Soho, London at MPC as a texture artist - though I'm sure I'll be doing more than just texturing as I was initially going to be doing both modeling and texturing, but they needed more texture artists when I started.

8 months later, I was unfortunately made redundant again at MPC. Shortly after this I was back on my feet doing some exciting freelance game character art for an upcoming AAA platform holder title. Once my month's contract came to an end with them, I moved on to work at Cinesite in Soho as a texture artist on the upcoming feature film, John Carter of Mars which should be out in 2012.

Let's hope things get a bit more stable...

~G~