Adventure Game Art Reviews: Session 1

Allright, art's my thing. It's what I like to do. But it's also something I like to look at, and today I'll be highlighting an artist who has had a big influence on my pursuit of game-art excellence. His name's Bill Tiller, and I first stumbled across his art in a LucasArts adventure game called The Curse of Monkey Island. Bill was responsible for the look of all the game's lavish backgrounds, we well as contributing illustrations to menu's and inventory items. Here are a few screenshots. Looking over those images, a few elements immediately come to the forefront; lighting, atmosphere, quality of line.
Lighting: You don't have to have excellent lighting to make an excellent piece of art. It helps, but it's not strictly necessary. What it does do though, is enliven the viewers imagination. If you see a shadow or bounce of light you don't immediately understand, your eyes will follow the clues. This results in more looking, which is huge. If you can get people to stare at your art for more then a few seconds, then some would say that you've succeeded as an artist. Bill's use of dramatic lighting makes the difference between a series of themed art images and a living, breathing game.
Atmosphere: It's possible to be manipulated by images (which has nothing to do with the popular craft of image manipulation, such as using photoshop to put your boss's head on a monkey's body) . When an artist can identify what elements of our world have an emotional impact on us, and then mimic those elements in a piece of art, he or she is attempting to influence (or manipulate) how we're feeling when we view the art. Bill does a fine job of using sunlight, moonlight, clouds, mist, fog, shadows and water to give the images a great psychological impact. Here's one of my favorite examples. Spooky, eh?
Quality of Line: Art's made up of a lot of different things. And while Mr. Tiller has a lot of good going for him in The Curse of Monkey Island, it's my opinion that his unique line work carries the art to a uniquely awesome place. I don't think a single stait line exists in the entire game. The scenes ooze all over the place - candlesticks twist against gravity, sandbars sag against the tides and tattered ship's sails twitch in the wind. Even the light seems to bounce about. In short, Bill isn't attempting to reproduce our reality on paper; he's making his own bizarre cartoon world where things don't always follow the rules.
Bill left Lucasarts ages ago. Currently he's his own boss; his home-grown game studio is called Autumn Moon Entertainment, and is based in Petaluma, California (about 50 minutes north of San Francisco). My fiancee and I were traveling through the area last summer, and Bill was kind enough to let us visit the studio and grill him insesently on his current project; a Vampyre Story. He, and his entire crew (which includes his wife Amy) couldn't have been nicer.