Wesley Burt may be a digital concept artist, but he's always got a pencil in one hand and sketchbook in the other.
"I had this image in my head of a page filled with a sea of heads – forms flowing in and out of each other a bit and lots of interesting features to drift around and look at."
Wesley Burt is a concept artist at Massive Black, working on games and film. Here he opens his Moleskine and reveals the thinking behind his striking visions in his own words.
"This image started fairly improvisational, but I found some interesting lines and shapes in the early sketch phase and then the idea really took hold."
"As I was working on the Thundercat drawing, I had ideas for a compatriot of his, Flying Lotus."
"Sometimes I start working up drawings of forms and shapes in a more abstract manner, and then bring it all together through rendering and uniform lighting. It’s a real mix of improvisation and retooling."
"I’ve always been a big Batman fan and one day at a coffee shop I started sketching out a loose idea I had in my head for a Batman cover. I wanted to make Robin a bit different, almost like a mutant."
"This was done for a group art show about different neighbourhoods in San Francisco. It’s an amalgamation of people and scenes I’d seen downtown and then remade through my imagination."
"This page started out as some random sketches and doodles, but quickly became all tied together and I worked it up as a character for a world I’ve been envisioning."
"There’s a storefront in the Mission district in San Francisco that has a huge wall of luchadore masks for sale. I was always interested in the way it looked, and thought it would make for a great sketch."
"This started as a quick sketch of a musician, Thundercat, sort of taken into a sky pirate RPG idea. I took the original sketch a lot further for this drawing and worked up the whole body."
Wes Burt works out of San Francisco at the offices of Massive Black, as a concept artist. He’s produced art for films and games, most recently the Dinobots for Transformers: Age of Extinction, and The Sims 4. He’s a huge fan of sketching on paper, either in a Moleskine or on Bristol pads of paper that are scattered around his desk.
