V-Art: Alex Nice

VES member, Alex Nice

V-Art showcases the talents of worldwide VFX professionals as they create original illustrations, creatures, models and worlds. If you would like to contribute to V-Art, send images and captions to publisher@vfxvoice.com.

Alex Nice (www.alexnice.com) is a concept illustrator, art director and matte paint- er who has worked on films such as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, Hugo, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and The Jungle Book. More recently, he’s lent his service to art direction for AR and VR projects, and a number of upcoming films. Here, Nice shares several personal artwork projects that focus on visual storytelling.

I’ve spent a good portion of my career as a matte painter for film and I’ve done plenty of city paintings, but most of them have been aerials for some reason. For this one, I wanted to do a futuristic cityscape viewed closer to ground level. I learned a lot doing this piece.

This second concept piece was done for a real-time VR experience I am currently working on in my spare time just for fun. I thought it would be cool to interactively mine an asteroid out in the dark isolated Kuiper belt outside of our solar system. I’m currently in the middle of developing this story further.

For this piece, I mixed 2D techniques and 3D array tools to create the dark structures in the distance. I wanted to challenge myself and see if I could create an ominous scene without going dark.

“Oh Noooooooo!!”… a quick ridiculous illustration I did earlier this year of the moon colliding with our beloved Earth. I find the idea of an astronaut watching a disaster like this from space to be kind of so sad, it’s funny.

I was really inspired by the look of the environments in the latest Mad Max film, so I did this quick color study concept piece. Here I have marauders attempting to take massive rusted desert stronghold.

I made these character designs using photos I took of human organs at the “Body Worlds” human anatomy exhibit. For these guys, I photo-bashed images of real human organs such as livers, tongues, lungs, etc., to come up with some interesting character designs. It was a fun challenge transforming my photos of gross parts of human anatomy into this ragtag group of misfits that I call the “The Uglys.”

“Detection of mini black holes at the LHC could indicate parallel universes in extra dimensions.” …. You idiots! What have you done?!