Today we’d like to introduce you to Shaddy Safadi.
Shaddy, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Concept Art is doing sketches and digital paintings for games and movies so that they have reference of what the final product should look like. Concept artists don’t make the product, they make art that suggests what it should look like. For me, it started freshman year of high school trying out for the basketball team. During drills, I was paired with the shortest, slowest and least coordinated player on the court. That’s when I knew I must suck at basketball so I quit that day and coach agreed to give me PE credit to not show up! As a kid, I was sensitive to encouragement and/or rejection, and in my back pocket, I had a slight knack for art sparked by my grandmother’s oil pastel drawings and small watercolors. This put me on an alternate path so in high school art became my thing. It was all I had to prop up my newly formed identity so I was a punk. I was Good, but I thought I was great. It wasn’t until I got rejected from Art Center College of design that I got my second slap, but this time the rejection motivated me. I had gotten accepted to other schools but I knew that I MUST get into the one that wouldn’t have me because how DARE THEY!
After a year of junior college and working on my portfolio, I was accepted. My unproductive hubris came back, and when I graduated, I didn’t have anything resembling a professional portfolio. Graduating from a 120k of school and working in an Italian restaurant in my home town was another slap. Especially having to talk to patrons, often my parent’s friends who’s kids became lawyers and doctors. They would give me pitiful encouragement but secretly feel vindicated that their kids didn’t persue a bullshit profession like art. It took over a year but I became determined and worked on my portfolio and got an offer at a small game company as a concept artist. Dream FULFILLED! After two years as the company struggled and I applied and barely got into Naughty Dog, famed creator of Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter and at the time a NEW game called Uncharted. It took a while for me to adapt to making a realistic game because as an artist, you want to work on fun creative ideas, not some game about a dude in a shirt. When that game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out and I played it, my path was sealed. Playing the game made me realize the way all the subtle (un-fun) compromises that were foisted on us were for the greater experience. Not everything could be dialed to 11 otherwise, you wouldn’t notice anything.
After six years, I realized that the box of becoming a concept artist was checked. I wasn’t interested in rising in the company and I wasn’t interested in staying and so without any real or reason I quit. Starting my studio began small, hiring one artist to work on jobs I was getting and in those early days, I had to say I was doing the work and make sure it was as LEAST as good as something I would do. It was. Now almost eight years later, we are about 15-20 freelancers and I’m the worst artist of the bunch! The team I built are some of the best concept artists in the world and after four years working with old colleagues (as a company this time) we finished over 850 concepts for the huge critical and commercial success The Last of Us 2. But now that box is checked and the next stage of my career has been creating writing and pitching animated movies. In tandem with the company, I started learning how to write.
After four years of work, I had a pitch that was decent, and leveraging some art connections was able to pitch it to executives at Netflix, Dreamworks and Illumination. They all liked but rejected it. It’s no problem I’m working on another because if there’s anything I learned from all those rejections and failures is that ego and entitlement are great and will make your dream and impossible dream, but it needs to be balanced with incredible humility. The kind that lets you be told that you’re just not good enough yet and take that as information to course correct rather than rejection. Treating people well, treating clients well, treating employees well, and never ever giving up until you fucking die is the cornerstone of success in this art world at least. Besides the journey IS the experience so best enjoy it at whatever level you’re at.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with One Pixel Brush – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
We do Concept Art, also known as Visual Development. Using drawing, painting and compositing skills, we use photoshop and a myriad of other programs to make a still image of literally anything anyone can imagine. The artists we have are arguably the best at it in the world and that argument might only come from James Cameron who employs what I believe are THE greatest concept artists in the world. — Our skillset is mainly used for pre-production for movies and video games but could be used for any application from visualization of a millionaires dream garage, to board game box art to characters for an animated Dreamworks TV show. If it needs designing or visualizing in any genre for anything, we do it. www.onepixelbrush.com
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Santa Monica is the best… for sunset walks at palisades park (which btw also makes a great mobile office with decent city wifi) — I love scootering to the beach. SAMO has a fun lively energy especially in the summer, great proximity to all kinds of nature (ever bushwhacked up zuma canyon?) and lots of cool little spots to eat and brunch at. The downsides? — It’s all rich white people although I will hand it to them before the riots started in may, I saw entire white families with little kids holding up homemade signs that said “RIP George” so the politics and general woke’ness is nice. And I’m not mad at anyone doing well. Hell who wouldn’t want to be able to afford a 6 million dollars 3 bedrooms 15 blocks from the beach? Regarding LA as a whole, it’s not a great city to live in. It’s got pockets of cool but it’s expanded well beyond what the roads can tolerate, it’s crazy expensive, it got built up in the worst era for architecture, and is generally ugly, at least compared to a Prague or Dubrovnik or Monaco… but it’s home regardless. Santa Monica is a little pocket that I love and I’m not leaving anytime soon… barring what happens in November perhaps! 🙂
Contact Info:
- Website: www.onepixelbrush.com
- Phone: 7209330557
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/one_pixel_brush/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onepixelbrush
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/onepixelbrush
Image Credit:
Shaddy Safadi, Florent Lebrun, Justin Wentz, Valerio Buonfantino
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