Cover Letter + Job Research

Design and Concept Artist - Weta

The first job that I looked at was one for a concept artist at Weta Workshop. The requirements are, must know how to use Maya, create concepts in Photoshop involving 3D, painting and compositing and must know Photoshop. While the first things I have an understanding on what to do one of the other requirements is using Unity which I have very little time spent with apart from when I made a small game when I was 14 which was a generic slender clone, with the knowledge of that experience disappearing, however I do wish to learn Unity in my own time so a job like this may not be a complete waste to apply for in the future.

Assistant Curator - Govett Brewster Art Gallery

One thing I have considered is curating in a museum which would be interesting and found a job at an art galley that mainly has a collection of contemporary art. The position is full time with a decent salary between 57-67000 a year.  In terms of my skill set I believe I would fit into a career like this having by the end of next year completed the bachelor of visual arts, having experience in art history and theory.

Graphic Designer - Garage Project

One of the jobs I found was an ideal which is a graphic designer for a small brewery company in Wellington which is very indie. Looking on the website each of the designs for the bottles appear unique and different to each other however they have similarities in the uniqueness of the art styles with each one being very different and unique to the average art you'd see. To apply for this role one must have experience with both digital painting and graphic design while drawing designs for there beer cans and bottles isn't the only requirement of the job the requirement is to also create illustrations and designs for marketing, promos, company documents and T-shirts. While I haven't got much experience with "Graphic Design" only having a small amount of experience in High school, I think I could still fit into a job like this and simply work on my Graphic design skills over the following holidays and build a portfolio around it. For me, this is an ideal job as I could also use my oil painting skills as many of the designs on the cans and bottles are very indie and experimental, so incorporating
mixed media into such a project would be more acceptable.

Illustrator - ?

When I eventually finish this course I want to try and work freelance and found many job opportunities on this website which is dedicated to providing artists, animators and illustrators freelance work. One of the things the site provides is a user rating of the people listing these jobs so artists can see if the user/company requesting a freelancer has a good reputation with artists. One of the things I found on this site is an illustrator needed for merchandise, marketing, stickers etc, something that I'm interested in. While the pay isn't listed the duration of the project is listed, requesting a freelancer from 1-3 months. Before considering a job like this I viewed the client/companies user rating and found that it's largely positive  so considering a job like this shouldn't be an issue. In terms of the art and graphic design needed from this company is very similar to the Wellington company Garage project.

Concept Artist - Blizzard

In my search for job listings I tried to limit myself to just New Zealand, however as I couldn't really find any more within the country that fitted into what I wish to do I went looking elsewhere and went on some video game company websites and found some listings. I finally settled on Blizzard and saw that they had an opening for a concept artist. One of the requirements of the job is to have knowledge in Maya, Photoshop and Zbrush while I have experience in both Maya and Photoshop I have not touched Zbrush however I would love to learn this software, as its prominently used to create 3D Sculptures and models for video games and films.  I did look at some other companies, one being Jagex a company that I've always wanted to work at located in Britain. One of the reasons why I wanted to work at Jagex is because they created Runescape one of my favorite mmos since I was 8, there style is very much fatasy inspired. Looking on there website I noticed they did have many job opportunities however they were for more senior roles and 3D animation roles on Run escape which is out of my skillet, however I do hope to gain the skills to work at this studio. With a role unavailable I looked at another studio that I widely respect, Blizzard.

 Character Artist - A44

Creators of the game Ashen, A44 studios is an indie video game company in New Zealand and are in need of a character artist. Like Blizzards requirements, Photoshop, Maya and Zbrush is a must, another must unfortunately is knowledge on using the Unreal games engine. In the future I do plan to learn working with game engines however at the moment I only plan to learn Unity in the future as its much easier to learn and from their I can learn Unreal. One of the things I noticed is the large difference between the job roles of a character artist and concept artist. Concept art is much more sketchy and is about developing the ideas that will eventually lead to a finished character, the character designer will then take that information and create a more illustrative and clean depiction and model said character in either Zbrush or Maya, maybe even both. I need to keep these differences in mind when applying for jobs.