Raphael Lacoste lives in Canada, Montreal, with wife and son since 2002. He was born in 1974 in Paris, but lived mostly around Bordeaux, south west of France until he left for Canada..
He studied in 1993 at Fine Arts school, Art and Media option, Photography and Video, at the same time, he was photographer and composer for a theatre company "les Pygmalions". He was already attracted by the scenery, mood and lighting. The Company Gave him the opportunity in 1997 to work on "the little Prince" of St Exupéry, he did there his first 3D pictures that were projected on giant screens with Pani 6KW projectors, Raphael was also the screening coordinator.
Later in 1998, he went to CNBDI school (Angouleme, France) and got a European Master of Art in 3D animation, his movie "Nîumb" was screened at Siggraph 2000, Imagina 2000, Anima mundi 2001...
He had teachers like René Laloux, Director of "Time masters", "Gandahar", "Fantastic Planet"... Raphael was very impressed by the work of his teacher and learned a bit of his knowledge...
Raphael Lacoste has been now Art director on Videogames and Cinematics (CG) for more than 7 years, he worked at Ubisoft on such licences as Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed (see Art Direction link on the top). He won a VES Award in february 2006 for his work as Art Director on Prince of Persia the Two Thrones Cinematics.
His Focus now is to work as Senior Concept Artist, Matte painter and production designer for Film. He is skilled particularly in environments, moods, picture composition and lighting (see portfolio).
He joins the RodeoFX team in montreal in october 2007.
If you, like many people, envision the process of 3-D CGI (Computer Graphics Imaging) as arranging a few wireframe shapes and pressing
The same skills of composition, proportion, perspective, color and, yes, drawing, are as important in the creation of a successful CGI image as they are in traditional painting. Yes
Raphaël Lacoste is a French matte painter and concept artist now living in Canada. He is also an award-winning art director for high-end games in the Prince of Persia series. He uses a combination of 3-D CGI and 2-D digital painting in Photoshop to create beautifully atmospheric images that are at times evocative of classical and 19th century paintings.
The image above, Path to the Gothic Choir (large version here), is the subject of a feature article on the CGSociety site that goes into some detail about the process of creating this kind of image, including preliminary sketches, initial renderings, details and an image of a painting by 19th Century German romantic painter Caspar David Fredrich called Cloister Graveyard in the Snow, that was the inspiration for Lacoste’s image.
Lacoste’s own site has a nice selection of his moody and atmospheric matte paintings and concept art, including a wonderful evocation of Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead. (See my previous post on Arnold Böcklin.)
Well, “The times they are a-changing”, and in reality the times are always changing. Artists, being the creative and expressive individuls they are, will always be game to try new techniques and mediums available to them. Be they the camera obscura, the daugerrotype,co-polymer paint (as acrylic paint was once called) and now CGI. Out of that experimentation will come “the good the bad and the ugly”. I’ve seen some amazing CGI artwork, whether it sticks around and has a lasting impact on the art world only time will tell.
I think some form of digital tools will be part of the “paintbox’ available to artists for some time to come, if only because of their wonderful flexibility. 3-D CGI may have a limited application in the creation of “painterly” images as the technolgy seems to be striving for photorealism, but digital painting tools like Photoshop and Painter have surpassed charcoal and oil as the most “plastic” of all mediums.
lines and colors is a blog about drawing, sketching, painting, comics, cartoons, webcomics, illustration, digital art, concept art, gallery art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it's fair game.
the “render” button, you may as well say painting is as easy as taking a brush and slapping some color on a canvas.
it’s possible for an amateur to make an image in a 3-D application without knowing those things, and the results are similar to someone trying to paint without them. I’ve seen enough poorly done amateur CGI, and have worked in 3-D applications myself just enough to have some idea of how important those skills are to a good CGI image.
Mr. Lacoste has indeed a developed sense for depicting sceneries and panoramas with the digital medium. Especially in giving the right atmosphere to backgrounds through a unique use of lighting. Some of his ispiration comes from past fine arts masters as the german romantic painter Gaspard-David Friedrich. I absolutely love this intense traditional artist and Raphael Lacoste is paying true tributes to his mastery with his own works of art.
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