Concept Artist / Illustrator
You know what? All three are right. You're an illustrator. You're a concept artist. You're just an artist. You're someone who uses their imagination to come up with a visual to help a project. There's no wrong answer.
Kid from a small town, Northern California, Redwood Coast. Hey, Eureka, how's it going? Came down to L.A. and got into Cal State, graduated with an art degree and was lucky enough to get a job as a PA, production assistant, in the art department of Deep Space Nine. So that was my start. It was just a lucky break, and when you're a young kid, you don't know what a great break that was. You just go with it.
TL;DRJim Martin worked for the production designer as an errand boy and supply runner, was allowed to draw on the side, and became junior illustrator in the show's second season.
I was working for the production designer, and basically I was the errand boy and supply runner, run blueprints down to set and make sure everybody has what they needed. My boss, Herman Zimmerman, knew I was an artist, and that was one of the reasons he hired me, that I had an art background, and he would let me do drawing on the side because he could see that that was my passion. I had that first year of Deep Space Nine to demonstrate to him that I really wanted to be a production illustrator. Luckily, I didn't have to start that job. I could be in the art department watching what a professional was and what that role really is. And so I didn't have to hit it cold. I had a year to figure it out, worked on some things. And then the second season, the illustrator left to go on to do movies, and my boss slotted me in as junior illustrator season two. And that was my break.
TL;DROn Deep Space Nine, Martin worked on the runabout with Rick Sternbach, some medical items, and his first prop, the Cardassian field control unit, then ships and many alien props.
The first thing I ever designed for the show, I worked with Rick Sternbach, the illustrator at the time, and we did the runabout design, and I think I did a little bit of medical stuff, and then my first official prop was the Cardassian field control unit. And I have a picture of that in my office to remind me that was my first actual illustrator assignment in the entertainment industry. And I noticed that someone has a reproduction that they sell on eBay. You can buy that little prop now. I don't mean to do a plug or anything.
And then I went on to do some ship design, and a lot of that job was doing prop design, because it's a space station and the premise of the show is that an alien culture comes in, visits the station, and they have to have their own stuff. So it's a lot of alien bags, alien weapons, this and that.
I did the Defiant, which is that tough little ship. I did a couple of Cardassian ships. I did some Bajoran ships. I did Sisko's solar sailor. Say that three times. The Jem'Hadar ship and some Federation stuff.
The bug ship, not the big flagship.
The beetle ship and the Maquis fighter. Just kind of some odds and ends. It was a really fun time when you really didn't know what was going to come along in the next episode. So all of a sudden you'd be in the art department and Herman would come by and let you know, oh, by the way, we have this coming up. And then you would do your design pass, it would go to the production, and then that would kick off the process.
So Starship Troopers. When I left Star Trek, that's definitely a type of universe. It has a lot of design rules that are unique to Star Trek. I get hired on Starship Troopers and they need me to do ships. I did the Roger Young, the landing ships, the rescue boat, the little escape pod. It was their ship, and did set stuff for them and their gear that they wear. And for me, being on that show helped me channel my inner Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, which is like a separate universe from designing Star Trek stuff. And I realized, oh, we can get boxy. Let's get military boxy and chunky, and let's really do it right. That was a pretty wild ride. Paul Verhoeven was a very energetic director.
I had got hired on to the RoboCop remake. I'm in Hollywood working on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I get an email from Chris, and he was looking for a concept artist to do some initial ideas for him for a project, a game project he wanted to start up called Star Citizen. I met him for lunch, and he graciously bought me lunch and pitched the idea to me, and he had me at "Could you design ships? Would you like to design some ships?" I mean, who can say no to that, right? That's like our dream job, to get to do spaceship design.
I think he was putting together, if I remember this correctly, it's been a little bit, but I think he was putting together kind of a demo animation, and he needed the bad guy ship, which would be the Scythe. And he needed some concept ideas for that.
Right. So for me, like right here, if we stay on this page for a minute: Chris gave me the brief of what he was looking for. This is my thinking pass, which is basically, you need to start putting it on paper, because if you just think about it in your head, it's going to come and it's going to go, and you need to start putting some ideas down. It's about drawing the right and drawing the wrong, but getting it all on a piece of paper.
TL;DRChris wanted the Scythe to feel dangerous, so Martin went with sharp, lethal shapes, then moved to asymmetry and a flying-dagger form, added armor plating, and built a scratch model.
He pitched me the idea of the aliens that we were fighting and that he wanted the ship to feel dangerous. So my first pass was, well, okay, if you're going to do dangerous, then you want it to be kind of sharp. You want it to feel lethal, which in a visual sense means it's not going to be soft and curved and gentle. It's going to be kind of spikes and blades and this and that. And my first pass is kind of a little bit of a, well, let's not do the bat wing. But you have to work through those. So I drew a lot of that, and I remember Chris reacting to it going, "Have you thought about maybe doing something asymmetrical?" And that was a very important moment in shifting to asymmetry, doing something a little bit more unique. And we started to work our way to the blade shape, which Chris said, "Hey, I like this. What if it was kind of like a flying dagger, a flying knife or a blade?" And that really kind of locked in the path. And then we could take it to some tighter ideas and eventually get closer to the finish. Now these aren't in any particular order. This obviously isn't blade shaped. That would be the lethal disk. Didn't make it. Then we got to this, which also Chris wanted to start working in the idea of armor plating to echo the soldiers inside. And then I went to a scratch model, which is basically just do a model that you can paint on top of, but really start to lock it into a 3D reality so that it's not just a one-view ship. Hey, that looks good, but what does the underside look like?
You know what was really exciting about it, though, was when you guys sent me a copy of that first demo, and it comes around from behind the asteroid, and it's the ship, and it's really exciting. That's a reward for an illustrator, to see your ideas make it all the way to the final, even though many people touch it after you, and that's how it should be, because you want people to come in and you want them to work it and plus it, and do to it the things that need to get done to make it fit into the game.
TL;DRThe sketch was an early Freelancer exploration that wasn't pursued; Martin explains that drawing bad ideas is part of the process, and asymmetry was abandoned in favor of tighter, more unibody shapes.
It could have been, but it was a design direction that we decided not to pursue. So I think originally I did a spread, again, of sketch ideas, some tighter, some a little bit looser, to start the process of what could it be.
The same process: thumbnails, trying to figure out shape language.
It's okay to hate a couple of these if you want to, because you're going to do stuff that is a good idea and you're going to do stuff that's a bad idea, but you've got to draw it to know, yeah, let's not do that. And then continuing on with more ideas. Is anything landing? Are we still searching? I think that the asymmetry was a starting point that I abandoned. We weren't going to do that. And then I think we started to lock into some ideas that were a little tighter, a little more unibody, and finally, I think that's the one that kicked off the design direction.
Yep. And then I met with Chris after kind of mocking up a quick study model to make it feel more real, and let's talk about what's working and what's not working. And I remember meeting him, and at the time I had moved to another show. So my context for this is, I remember getting the assignment and going, oh yeah, that's when I was working at Universal on another project. And then I jumped over the hill to Hollywood and we had a meeting to talk about this and to keep the process going.
Yeah, that was earlier on. And then I remember we needed to make sure that we had a cargo hold that was viable. And that's when we started working the back ramp door to a cargo hold. This was an alternate telling of the cockpit, which ultimately was not successful.
I was, but being in live action, you have to do both. You need to be able to 3D model starting points, but then you also have to shift gears and just be right at digital paint. But I find that in the gaming work, the 3D part of it is a bigger chunk. And so when you're forced to do a bigger chunk, then I think you grow that skill. So it's been a growing process for me to go, oh, you know what? I'm going to go back in and hit this model again. I'm going to do it until it's right.
TL;DRThe Cutlass brief was essentially a pirate ship with a cargo aspect, so Martin gave it a rough, slightly nefarious look, including engines that hint at skulls.
So for me, the kickoff on this one was: this is going to be a pirate ship. That's the one element that I remember more than the other stuff. This is a ship that is getting usurped by people with pirate intentions. And that starting point for me was kind of the moment of fun that, you want to find your happy place in the assignment and go, okay, it's pirate time. Let's kind of do something that looks a little evil, looks like it's nefarious. And I remember doing the back engines going, these are kind of a little bit like skulls, but not, but maybe just enough to have fun with it. And that was the start of this assignment. And I know that it needed to be a cargo hold, but there needed to be a cargo aspect to it too. But it really had to have that kind of rough and tumble pirate feel to it.
So then I think the conversation changed a little bit to, well, what if someone's using it as a medical ship, like an ambulance or whatever? What are the different roles it can play? And then I kind of break out of that early idea of let's do the pirate ship and into a little bit more of, well, let's make it feel more utility, and also let's make it a little cleaner and kind of give it a multi-role. And that's where this comes in. So it kind of goes from "arr" to utility.
TL;DRThe Caterpillar was to be a long freight hauler, and Martin's challenge was to evoke a caterpillar without being ridiculous, using a long segmented body and early Cutlass influence.
Okay, the Caterpillar.
Was it called the Caterpillar?
It was called the Caterpillar, and it needed to be like a long hauler, kind of a freight hauling ship, and for me, though, they had me at Caterpillar, because that was the challenge. How are you going to make a ship that kind of evokes the idea of a caterpillar but isn't something that's sort of ridiculous? That's my design challenge.
In these early drawings, you see a lot of Cutlass influence because, again, for the first time, you get to start off with something else. So it looks like the Cutlass with a bigger centerpiece here.
And this kind of sketch is me thinking as I'm drawing. Like, hey, what if I put these on the side? What about that? Oh, bad idea. Maybe I can try it. And then how do I work in my core idea for this, which was if we're going to do Caterpillar, let's do a long segmented shape and put in the Caterpillar body.
That was me going, how do you say Caterpillar in a spaceship?
And when you had to come back and pitch to Chris a long segmented ship?
I think that I kind of showed, and I let the sketches do the pitching, and kind of talked them through: well, maybe we can do repeated long segmenting to say caterpillar, but also do our best to make it a viable, interesting ship in the universe.
And this is me just kind of throwing it out, saying, hey, let me do a cutaway real quick and explain it. So I did this cutaway, purely on speculation, like, hey, let me show you what I think the command crew pod looks like. I mean, the cargo, I did a cargo module and that's pretty straightforward. But what if we open it up, and I'll just show you what I think is going on inside here. And that's what that was. And I live for that, by the way. A cutaway for me is like illustrator joy.