My name is Drew, AKA Slaor. I'm from Newcastle Australia and currently working as a freelance designer and illustrator. A full resume can be found here.
Since I began working in commercial design and illustration in 1995, I've produced work for hundreds of clients in diverse fields ranging from surf clothing design through to military biotechnology and much in between. Although well experienced in the advertising and marketing sectors with proven success at implementation and coordination of global branding strategies for one client in over 40 countries, my primary expertise and passion is still applied design and illustration of a more challenging nature, specifically 3D design and interactive media.
Although the recent focus of my 3D work has been related to indie game design, I have also produced content and renders for film and TV, branded assets for architectural pre-visualisation, molecular visualisation and conceptual prototyping for molecular biotechnology research products. The designs I consider to be my best work have usually involved hard surface modelling.
Most of my 2D illustrations and designs have been contracted for advertising purposes in various media or as web content and I have experience in software production related design of icons, GUI elements and overall interface as well as statistical data visualisation. I have also been known to write copy.
Among other things I am a recreational gamer and aspire towards game design - usually with several collaborative projects on the burn at any given time. I particularly like developing video games in terms of defining and producing 3D assets and environments - each new generation of 3D games to me refines and redefines the cutting edge of a brand new art form, the barest potential of which has yet to be truly realised. The development of modern commercial quality games requires a staggering amount of input and attention to detail - but the results speak for themselves in stunningly real and visceral simulations.
Basically as a game designer, you not only get to design the coolest shit, you also get to then take it for a spin, which usually involves blowing other cool stuff to hell with the cool rapid-fire megadeath cannons that you also created (often in notepad). Making video games requires a multi-disciplinary skillset and a flexible approach, but also demands a willingness to invest great big slabs of time into a years long project that must be assembled slowly and precisely on demand like some kind of bizarre multidimensional jigsaw puzzle on acid, then tested and re-tested - often until all involved hate the sight of the thing. So yeah it's fun but these days it's damn hard to accomplish by yourself. Card games are easier, I design those too.
The main purpose of this page is to track progress of a few pet projects and display my most recent (and/or interesting) commercial and private work, planning to post some design tutorials as the mood strikes and will of course relay anything cool or unusual I encounter in the wild. As far as this blog goes, that will usually be design or technology oriented and probably feature lots of hi-tech new guns and UAV's and stuff like that and will steer well clear of anything political cos not even I wanna get me started...
Thanks for visiting!
