Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

Adam Spizak is a 3D artist and illustrator based in London, UK. He focuses on visual storytelling and creating engaging narratives.

The ’90s kid.

Adam’s love for video games and pop-culture shines through his work, with many of his pieces being directly inspired by video games. Growing up in the ’90s had a significant influence on his artistic sensibilities, from the early Amiga computer demo scene to the first big CGI films – digital art was here to stay. Video games became a core focus of this digital art shift – a medium where art and joy came together. 

Growing up, my father bought a ZX Spectrum with the Jet Set Willy video game… I didn’t understand why, but I felt an instant connection with it. In the next few years, we got an Amiga 500, and my mind was blown by how incredibly imaginative games could be. There were no boundaries, no limits other than your imagination.

Since then, Adam has worked on many video game-related projects as a 3D artist, both making assets (rigging models!) and creating key art. In recent years he has shifted his focus to creating 3D illustrations inspired by video games and pop-culture.

I have always enjoyed video games, but it took me a while to understand that game art is what I want to focus on. Game art is fascinating to me as it has the very challenging task of conveying the game’s emotional meanings without the existing context. When you play a game, you interact with it, hear it, see it – all of these stimuli/components/facets/elements give you context, the emotional connection. Finding that perfect idea to convey all these emotions and feelings in a single image is incredibly rewarding but often emotionally exhausting. It feels exceptional like you’ve solved the most profound mystery or found a special meaning of something only you see.

The Why.

The sensation of finding “the why”. As artists, we often crave and fear that next great idea…” what’s next?”. We can’t always put our finger on it, but we know when our art “works”. Late nights, eyes burning, neck sore from leaning in and staring at the screen – when things suddenly click – it’s no longer only an image; it has a deeper meaning now. We found “The Why”. 

Finding “the why” is often the hardest (and easiest!) part of the creative process, “the why” is when the image speaks to us – it now has meaning. But what is “the why”?

When I have an emotional connection to something, whether it’s a video game or movie, I always try to understand the underlying components that make it. I want to (no, I have to!) know why it works, what makes it “special”. Scene by scene. Making these connections between different elements is so satisfying it makes me appreciate the work more. One of the reasons I love hiding small elements and easter eggs in my art is for other people to have the same “oh wow” emotional connection and discovery with my art.

Making game-and-movie-inspired fanart can often seem like an obvious form of art to create – who doesn’t like it. It’s easy, right?

I’m an emotional person, and art is always about emotions. I always feel that great fanart is more than just a pretty image – it’s emotional and moving. It gives you the same feeling you had when you played that game or watched your favourite movie scene (10 times in a row) or listen to that single line from your fave song. THAT emotional snapshot is always my goal. I don’t want to make “a cool picture” – I want to capture the essence in a single shot. The Why.

Get in touch with Adam online:

https://twitter.com/adamspizak
https://www.instagram.com/adam_spizak/
spizak.com

Editorial is open for submissions: [email protected]

“Taken…”  is a collaboration with Nikolay Georgiev aka @fuelstains that came about from meeting through my webcomic @threepanelcrimes on Instagram. @threepanelcrimes is a different crime story told each week in just three silent panels. 

The project is a triptych, consisting of three separate panels of a cyborg unaware of an intruder in her home. The third panel is ambiguous, they know what happens but leave the viewer to ask questions and share theories with others. Emphasizing a major part of the human fascination with crime, not only what happened but why? 

So, did she fight the robot off? Was she kidnapped? Or perhaps the bot just wanted its headphones back ;)…

Tony @threepanelcrimes:

I was drawn to Nikolay’s work because of his skill at drafting images that are hyper-detailed but don’t ever have a sense of crowding. I’m a big fan of early broadsheets and engravings from the 19^th century and there is a bit of that in his line work but it’s with cyborgs which is just fucking badass! He really hit it out of the park with the colors, bringing a sense of impending doom along with a cozy feeling depending on what part of the image you’re looking at.

I started writing comics scripts in 2014. 

Inspired by writers like Ed Brubaker, Brian Azzarello, and Warren Ellis. I enrolled in a comic writing class at Meltdown Comics and focused on completing a story from class, which I set out to self-publish as a calling card book.

After a few false starts, I managed to put together the money, find an art team and finish a single-issue comic. It took a long time, but now I had something to show people.

I printed the book and after selling a few copies to local comic shops (thank you Meltdown Comics & House of Secrets) I had a few hundred books left.

I went to shows and took a few copies out of the trunk of my car to hand to editors. Nothing happened, no emails were answered, after a few months I thought about giving up. I didn’t expect to launch a career off of a one-shot, but I had hoped for some traction.

Neil Gaiman summed up the feeling perfectly: “Getting published is like throwing flower petals over the Grand Canyon and waiting for the boom.”

A few months later I looked at the book with fresh eyes and realized the story wasn’t very good. I decided to go back to the basics. I retook the beginner’s comic book writing class at Meltdown Comics.

Later that year while browsing on YouTube a video popped up: “4 Time-Saving Tips (from a guy who spent 13 YEARS drawing a comic)” by a cartoonist named Lars Martinson.

Lars had spent years writing and drawing his own graphic novel when he realized that if all of his projects took so long, it created a few problems for him. 

Things like the end of the book looking drastically different from the beginning as his art skills would improve over the years. Or finding plot holes that he’d missed for years and now had hundreds of possible rewrites.

Lars had a great piece of advice: “Fail faster.”

He advised that people just starting out (people like me) should do as many small projects as possible to hone their skills. He made the point that the smaller something is, the easier it is to find out why it’s not working and find a solution.

I wrote some single page stories and learned quite a lot from my mistakes.

At the time I was reading Will Eisner’s “Contract with God”. I wondered who influenced him and stumbled onto Lynd Ward’s work. Lynd Ward did a series of “Wordless Novels” that were made of woodcuts. I tracked them down and was fascinated by how much story he could get into a single image on a page.

The idea for @threepanelcrimes popped into my head. A complete crime story, once per week, told in just three silent panels.

I wrote eight scripts and started making it a daily practice to write at least one per day. I reached out to an artist (Dexter Wee) and a colorist (Chris Northrop) and we set out to finish and post at least one comic strip per week. No matter what. 

In the last few years, it’s been a great motivator for staying focused on longer projects. Getting that sense of accomplishment from putting something out and engaging with an audience.

We’ve grown to over 30K followers on Instagram and I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with about 200 different artists, animators and musicians from all over the world. I’m really grateful for the community and the great people I’ve met because of @threepanelcrimes and I look forward to continuing with it!

Nikolay Georgiev @fuelstains:

What attracted me to the project was mainly the interesting challenge of the format and how easy it was to work with Tony. From working in concept artwork and my Biopunk personal projects, I am used to storytelling in a single image. There are many examples of longer form sequential art, but having to tackle a sequence of 3 panels to tell a story was quite unique and distinctly challenging. 

I went for a futuristic art deco luxury design to sell the idea of tastefully rich for the girl, but I also wanted a sense of loneliness with the large and sterile space. The colors were meant to be decadent and slick with a club-like atmosphere to communicate the coldness of artificial life and the isolation of extreme wealth. Oh, and obviously the red robot eye was classic alarm/danger choice.

I enjoyed the script and followed it closely, reading into the character of the girl a lot. Like listening to music/being a musician is the only way for her to feel at ease and that she matters as she’s alone in an expensive apartment with very few things in it. It’s why I’m glad we didn’t show her reaction to the robot – maybe she was content with it, or maybe she was terrified.

By Vinciane Jones, Verisart

Universal Everything are an international digital art and design collective established in 2004 by Matt Pyke. They use emerging display technologies as their canvas, exploring human behaviors as well as the diversity of nature, emotion and a future-positive outlook with a vibrant, figurative aesthetic. Much of their work is immersive and interactive and they have experimented with augmented and virtual reality. Universal Everything have collaborated with Nike, Google, Zaha Hadid architects, Samsung, Chanel and Sydney Opera House among many other well-known brands and institutions. Their works have been exhibited at La Gaîté Lyrique, Victoria & Albert Museum and Barbican, among others.

Universal Everything recently created their first-ever NFT work, minted on March 15 in exclusive partnership with Verisart and SuperRare as part of 10×10: 10 inaugural NFTs by 10 major contemporary artists over 10 weeks.

Nature Rewilding 

The inaugural NFT entitled Nature Always Wins – Airport is part of a wider series “Nature Always Wins” which explores rewilding. 

“The idea came about a year ago at the beginning of lockdown when everything stopped and you started seeing nature rewilding places,” explains founder Matt Pyke. “In the city, you would see sports fields and pavements with nature creeping through and more birds singing than usual. It’s almost like as soon as humankind locks down then nature takes over again. There was something really positive about that despite what was going on.” 

The work was created in procedural visual effects software. “The computer code is growing nature onto the surface. It’s working in the same way that nature works in real life, where it’s taking simple algorithms and growing plant forms out of seeds but we’re doing it in a digital way.” 

Art that gives back 

With their inaugural NFT sale, Universal Everything wanted to give back. They will donate 50% of the proceeds to Givewell’s Maximum Impact Fund. The Fund distributes donations to the charities that are the most effective at improving and saving lives for each dollar spent. 

Universal Everything’s inaugural NFT is certified with a Fair Trade Art Certificate from Verisart, an award-winning blockchain certification platform. Fair Trade Art is an initiative by Verisart designed to bring together artists and social impact organizations to do good. The certificate signals that funds from the sale of the artwork are benefiting a charitable cause. 

Designed to empower artists to tell the story of their work, the Verisart digital certificates include additional images, videos and many other types of files. For collectors, Verisart’s patent-pending Certificates of Authenticity (COA) form an integral part of collecting NFTs. They provide confidence in the identity of the artist and the verified history of the artwork.

A collaborative process  

Universal Everything have a small number of full-time staff and collaborate with creators, artists and designers from all over the world. Pyke explains, “Our studio has always been remote working, ever since I started it in 2004 and that was partially because geographically I wasn’t living near the people I wanted to collaborate with.”

Working collaboratively and remotely has its advantages and enables Pyke to select skilled creators from around the world. “With every new artwork we make, I tend to curate a different selection of collaborators according to the skills needed. So it might be an architect, a musician and a programmer or it might be an animator and a photographer.”

“For this project, we worked with one animator in London and a sound designer in Brighton. The next project we’re doing has a completely different team.”

Pursuing emerging technologies 

Universal Everything are always looking to experiment and expand their horizons with new means of displaying and producing works. 

“As a studio, we’ve always pursued emerging technology as the medium we work in, either in terms of canvases with new forms of screens like large architectural screens or flexible screens. But also in terms of the means of production, we always use technologies like generative design, new forms of visual effects software and artificial intelligence.” 

“NFTs felt like the perfect emerging medium to work with” because they provide a way of creating unique digital works. 

Universal Everything are developing several exciting projects, including working on several immersive, fully-sensory installations for museums and galleries and developing generative videos which never repeat themselves. 

Bidding for Universal Everything’s inaugural NFT, Nature Always Wins – Airport, closes around 1pm EST on March 18. 

About the artist 

Universal Everything are an international digital art and design collective established in 2004. Using emerging display technologies as their canvas, UE produce screen-based artworks that subvert cinematic CGI, physics simulations and real-time gaming graphics, to create new forms of the moving image. Their work is at times immersive and interactive, often journeying into augmented or virtual reality. It exists at the balance between abstract and figurative – the point at which a hint of life emerges, and technology becomes soulful. With a background in graphic design and music video direction, UE repurposes the seductive language of modernist design and high-gloss consumerist style into a vibrant, figurative aesthetic. Universal Everything have collaborated with Nike, Google, Zaha Hadid architects, Samsung, Intel, Chanel and Sydney Opera House among many other well-known brands and institutions.