Artist inspiration-Aaron Garbut

Although I didn’t necessarily look towards any artist for inspiration in creating the videogame art for this project, the artist that I found to be the most influential for this was Aaron Garbut and his work on the Grand Theft Auto videogames. Garbut is a videogame artist and the artist director at the company Rockstar North. Although he is most famous for his work on the Grand Theft Auto series Garbut has done other work on the videogames “Manhunt” and “Tanktics.” He started doing work ever since the first GTA game came out in 1997 and has since been working on the series for this game, with the latest being “Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City.”






Even though my artwork for this videogame project honestly looks nothing like Garbut’s, I really liked the way he actually went through his process of being an art director for the game artwork. In several interview’s he states that at the beginning of the game creation there is just a lot of random ideas, characters and other media that doesn’t necessarily fit into the final game, but that all of this is an important process in creating the final artwork for the game. This reminded me of way me and Michael felt at the beginning of this project; not knowing what kind of artwork to create and generally just having a bunch of random ideas that we hoped the game creators would like. Garbut states in an interview with CGsociety “we have a bunch of ideas, elements of the story, the characters, locations, the general tone, gameplay elements, technology, mission ideas, and we just mix it all up and see where it goes trying to steer it along the way. It's all a big scary tangled web. But it works”(cgsociety.org.)





One of the main things that attracted me towards Garbut’s artwork was his use of thick black lines around objects and characters. When I created the characters for the artwork of this game project I originally just added a thick black line around everything, not for any particular reason but just because it felt natural. In Grand Theft Auto the artwork also has a sense of light to every scene. Although I couldn’t really work with lighting too much in the game, I liked how everything in GTA had a real but almost cartoony look. Garbut help create this aspect of the artwork along it’s development more with older versions of the game. Even though he helped create this along with newer games, there was more of a focus on making everything look real in the later games and therefore the thick black line was barely used.





There is little known about Aaron Garbut but his work on the GTA games is widely recognized. Although he oversees all of the visual elements of the game creation a lot of his ideas are used in the final versions of these games. His use of thick black lines and his lighting effects are two of the main aspects of Garbut’s work that I find interesting. Also, his use of color is also used well throughout every series. Not too bold of color but enough to create an emotional response in its players. For example, even though this plays into the lighting affects as well, the dim-lit, cityscape backgrounds helps play into the main character’s actions and responses.Also, the use of a lot of solid colors is something that I wanted to apply to my artwork as well. Overall though, I love his style of game design artwork and I think that for future projects, with more time I could incorporate more of his ideas.