For the last year I’ve been teaching myself how to make art using 3d modeling software. Up until now I’d always considered myself a 2d artist/illustrator/painter and I found working in 3d to be cumbersome and un-fun. But in the last few years my illustration work has become more mechanical, more detailed, and I began to find the fun in the tedium. I began to visualize everything I was drawing/painting as three dimensional objects, so, realizing those same drawn objects in a different software was less of an abstract mental leap.
Another factor in my decision was that the demands of commercial work in terms of speed and accuracy meant that doing complicated perspective drawing and re-drawing the same objects from multiple vantage points was a too time-consuming for production schedules. My friends and I started learning sketchup together to build sets at our old job. It was a huge benefit to the project as a whole and even after we each eventually went our own ways to different companies, those skills and processes stuck around.
In March of last year I bought a bundle of Blender tutorials from Vaughn Ling and set to work learning Blender. I decided to start with something simple and followed along with the video steps to model an NES controller.
