Interview: Rob Bliss
This digital art pioneer tells Beren Neale that tomorrow’s concept artists must be “ballsy but polite” to make an impression
The digital art pioneer art believes the next generation of concept artists must be “ballsy but polite” to make an impression.
Rob Bliss was giving up on his nascent career as an illustrator. Fresh out of Brighton’s School of Art, he had moved to Brixton, London, but hadn’t exactly hit the ground running. “More like face planted onto a concrete car park,” he recalls. Although he was subsidised by the government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, money was tight and after 18 months of rejections, he was done. So he applied to work at his local branch of Forbidden Planet.
“I didn’t get that either,” Rob says, but his sketchbook, which he carried with him everywhere, caught the eye of the store manager. “He said, ‘I know some people up at 2000 AD, so we’re not gonna employ you, but maybe I can recommend you to them.’
“The saying ‘Getting a foot in the door’ is repeated so much that it becomes meaningless. But it’s true. You can have what seems like a hundred foot-wide wall in front of you, and then a little door just gets opened by someone from the other side, and you slip through.”
This was Rob’s big break, and it was a trial by fire. He was tasked with drawing the first 36 pages of the new Igor Goldkind-penned comic The Clown, which would run from 1992
to 1994. It was a title that another artist in the 2000 AD ranks was set to draw, but whose rising star meant he was too busy to take it on. Indeed, it was the artist who’d originally lit a fire under Rob to make a career out of art. But more on him later…
Everything as entertainment
Growing up in Trowbridge, south-west England, and going to school in Bath, Rob’s recollections of his 1970s childhood sound uneventful. “There weren’t a lot of distractions,” he says, “and there was plenty of times that you could be bored.” No epic fantasy TV series to consume on the weekend, just the single Sunday TV film, or the odd trip to the cinema.
The dreaded writing exercises at school morphed into surreptitious drawing excursions. B-movie cinema outings fuelled his imagination, and his growing collection of 2000 AD and Action Comics were read and then copied. Faced with all this, Rob says that, “I began to see everything as entertainment.”
After school he studied illustration in Brighton with thoughts of working on magazines, in the style of Ralph Steadman or Raymond Briggs. Then he saw Simon Bisley’s work. “That was really year zero for me, because I always had a bit of a problem of never having come across something that I truly believed in artistically.”
In the “right-on, uptight”, and not a little narrow-minded world of late1980s art college, “I felt like I was surrounded by people who were faking it, and I felt autistic. Nothing made sense to me,” Rob says. He liked the 2000 AD art of the time, “and Brian Bolland’s work, etc, but they all seemed liked these 40-year olds or something. Until Simon came along, especially his Sláine stuff, and it was like, ‘Fuck. What’s that?’ It was a mixture of horror and excitement. There was a visceral reaction to it that I didn’t have to pretend existed.”
The Clown gig was beginning to feel too much like an office job. Rob quit a couple of episodes before its end, and Greg Staples took on the final strips.
There was a visceral reaction to it that I didn’t have to pretend existed
Rob had made some great friends there, but constantly being skint and living off Pot Noodle was taking its toll. So he went for “the Holy Grail: DC covers.” This somehow segued into a stint at Magic: The Gathering, which ran its course due to wildly different interpretations of Rob’s art. “They thought I was drawing willies in everything, so my sketches had to be vetted for phalluses. Apparently, I had some complaints from parents.”
By the late 1990s Rob was in his early 30s, working for a computer firm that’s “not worth talking about,” not knowing what his next move was. Close to where he was based in London’s Camden were the Jim Henson Studios, which also housed the Hallmark Film offices. But history was repeating itself, notes Robs. “It was that theme again: how do get through this wall and get to show my work to the person inside? How do I get past the gatekeepers?”
So he printed his portfolio, went into the building and left it in Henson’s art director’s pigeon-hole. ““I got a call within a day,” he says. “I worked briefly for Henson (Flintstones 2 and an early stab at The Water Horse), and this lead to me working on Hallmark’s TV films. That’s the first time I had the chance to properly make friends with Dermot Power and Glyn Dillon.”
the call of the small screen
Dermot had his own 2000 AD battle scars, but Glyn was of Deadline comics pedigree, which had released Tank Girl. “They were the guys at comic conventions smoking cigars wearing sunglasses indoors, and we were the ones with flies buzzing around our heads trying to hang out with
Bisley,” Rob recalls. Soon they’d all be working together on TV series like Arabian Nights (2000), Jason and the Argonauts (2000) and an early version of James Gurney’s Dinotopia, that eventually got canned.
Digital then and now
With a forward-thinking production department, Macs were soon brought in, and Photoshop installed. Rob had worked on the program before Wacom tablets were around, but when they arrived, “it took a week to adjust and then we didn’t look back”.
He also started experimenting with 3D in the early 2000s (toiling for hours in Maya to create results that he can achieve in minutes today in ZBrush), a move that he suggests all concept artists today should consider. “You’ve got to make yourself competitive, so learn 3D even if you’re a 2D artist.”
It’s a risk, says Rob, that some younger artists who want to get into the concept art industry forget their main function. “The first service you’re providing is a picture that people who can’t draw, or don’t have time to draw, can look at. So it needs to be clear enough that they all know what they’re looking at, and they can say what they do and don’t like about it.”
There’s no concept artist cutout that people should emulate, he stresses. Working hard and expanding your skills is a given, but if you’re looking for anything more than that, Rob can’t help you.
“I never got into art wanting to be a consummate professional,” he says. “The idea of talking to youngsters and telling them they must supply X, Y and Z in a responsible manner for the client… well, that’s not the sort of advice I’d give them – even though it might be good advice,” he adds. “I don’t want a generation of butlers coming up. I want a bunch of ballsy but polite, passionate young people who really, really enjoy the design process to enter film, and to try and push back against the inevitable fight between the artist and the business side.”
Harry Potter and the idea boss
From Rob’s first big film Lara Croft (2001), to his successful run working on the Harry Potter franchise, the artist has had his fair share of run-ins with the “business side” of things. Though not keen to dwell on the
I want ballsy but polite, passionate young people who enjoy the design process…
“controlling, incredibly ungenerous” people he’s encountered, he’s happy to share the flip side of the film experience. “For me, working with Stuart Craig – the production designer for all the Potter films – was like working with David Attenborough. The thing that makes the difference is that he genuinely enjoys the process of designing something.”
Working with someone who knows there’s a fair amount of “digging around and being unsuccessful before you hit upon something good,” is the goal. Ultimately, Rob advises that “if you’re not working for someone you enjoy working for, you’ll look back and realise that’s when you did all your shit work.”
His parting advice is that as long as you’re creating art for the sake of creating art, you’re on to a winner. “I think going back to the beginning of our conversation, just like in school, I’ve always enjoyed sitting there drawing and painting. It’s as much about keeping myself occupied as anything else. It’s not necessarily about the end result. It’s just about the doing of it, you know?”