We caught up with recent ACC alumni and award winner of the 2023 Best Game Art at our Manchester campus to hear all about his time studying with us.
Every year we host the Access Creative College Showcase Awards to celebrate and praise the incredible work our students produce. Across all of our campuses we award titles from best song, to best design, to best game art to best software, and so much more! For our 2023 ceremony, Ed took home the award for Best Game Art in Manchester.
Ed won this award whilst studying on our Games Art Level 3 Course. This course teaches how to develop ideas and concept art for games, create characters, objects, environments and more.
Hi Ed, please tell us why you decided to study Games Art with us?
I chose this game art course because I wanted to expand my skills in making 3D artwork so that I could eventually move on to use them in my professional career.
What did you enjoy about this course?
A big part of the course I enjoyed was being able to experiment and use my creativity to really make something special. Specifically the assignment where we were tasked to make a 3D environment really showed me how I can use my creative skills to develop and build large projects.
What are your next steps?
My next step is University. I just started studying Visual Effects at Futureworks and after this I would like to move into the industry and work in TV and film.
That’s great news! How did Access Creative College get you to where you needed to be?
Access was able to help me by teaching me how to develop professional work flows and software. If it hadn’t been for Access I wouldn’t be able to hit the ground running at uni when it came to computer work and using Maya and Substance Painter. This was a huge advantage and big help when it comes to moving into the type of course I’m currently on.
With that in mind, would you recommend the game art course?
I would recommend the course, specifically because it gave that sort of push that I needed in order to develop my skills further. Not to mention how friendly and supportive the tutors were.
Congratulations on winning best games art in Manchester! How do you feel after winning? Can you please tell us more about the project?
Thank you! It was an absolute honour to be chosen for the award and I really regret not being at the ceremony to collect it.
The winning project was an animation I made based off of a scene from a Doctor Who audio book. Everything in it was modelled, animated and rendered by me, including the environments and image of the space station on the screen. It was the first animation I had done which featured the new series design of Dalek, which is something I had struggled to model before, but after developing my skills, I had managed to finally get a result that I felt quite happy with!
Overall the project took about a week to complete, including: render, set up and animation time. It was a lot of fun to do and in my personal opinion it’s one of the best renders I’ve produced so far and I’m really proud of it.
You can find Ed’s Art Station portfolio and Socials through here.
If you’re interested in studying Games with us, learn more about our course here.