Biography
Date of Birth: 29th June 1985.
Nationality: English.
Matt Allsopp is a talented young artist from a small village in the countryside of England. Having only taken up digital art at college in 2004 he has quickly gone on to work as a conceptual illustrator for numerous films, books, tabletop games and video games; he has designed logos and brochures for several companies and has produced artwork for DVD covers, discs, inserts and other merchandise. As such, he is quickly obtaining a reputation for the quality of his work in the digital media industry and in the online community, Deviant Art, where his work can be found represented under the avatar Skybolt.
Starting to draw from a very young age, Matt has always been capable of producing artwork to a standard ahead of his years. Going through his first year schoolbooks that unexpectedly turned up in the loft some time back proved to be a hilarious testament to his artistic merits as a child. Every page would consist of a few lines of appalling handwriting, made-up words, backwards R's and spelling error after spelling error, closely followed by a full page detailed illustration of an astronaut battling space aliens, a robotic fight to the death or pirates being decapitated. Thankfully, his grammar and spelling has improved since those days as well as his art, which, just like when he was young, continues to take up practically all of his time. If he's not working on his next commissioned piece or painting some bizarre futuristic vehicle design he can normally be found sketching, flicking through concept art books or defacing some important document with his incessant need to doodle.
Having topped all of his art classes through first and secondary school, achieving top grades in all of his art-related subjects, winning a few trivial school-competitions and selling some of his abstract work back to his teachers no-less, he went on to study art at sixth form before going on to do a foundation course at Nuneaton College. Amusingly, after his GCSE's Matt decided not to do A-levels but go straight into studying art at college. He later changed his mind and found himself walking back in on his old art teacher, mid-rant, about how he would under no circumstances allow anyone to come back into his A-level art class who had not enrolled from day one. Interrupting this lecture, Matt asked if he "could please come back" at which point his teacher said "sure, take a seat" much to the confusion of the rest of the class. Matthew's 'hard-ass' art teacher's sudden, hypocritical change of tact proves that he has always been seen as a talented artist. His work is still shown as an example to the current art students at school some 3 years after he left.
At college, Matt went on to get a Distinction in his Art and Design foundation course in 2004 where he studied, amongst other things, fine art, photography and digital art. Having worked in a traditional manner before this course, Matt found that working digitally gave him a lot of flexibility and a chance to be more explorative with his artwork. As such, for his final year project he decided to concept and produce a short trailer for a made-up film that he entitled ‘The Ark’ using solely digital techniques.
Based loosely on the story of Noah’s Ark set in a parallel universe ‘The Ark’ was more like Mad Max than it was a bible story. The Ark itself was a luxurious city built upon a giant air-balloon that was suspended over the ruins of a desolate city where those people unfortunate enough not to be on the Ark had to fight and scavenge their way through life. Noah was one of these people after Yahweh had exiled him from the city that he once created. Seeking revenge, Noah builds an enormous army of men and machines to wage war with Yahweh and help reclaim the Ark.
Most of the artwork that was done for ‘The Ark’ falls way below Matt's standards today and is not featured on this site, although the final trailer can still be found here for those that are interested.
Matt's artwork has vastly improved since his college days, but even so, his final year presentation of 'The Ark' was impressive enough to attract the attention of Simon Cox, a budding film director, editor and founder of his own film company, StormRider Films.
Looking for a concept artist to work on his current film venture, 'The Kaleidoscope Man', Simon contacted Matt and commissioned him to create four pieces of concept art for the film. Matt has since worked closely with Simon over the last year, creating some 30 pieces of artwork for 'The Kaleidoscope Man' as well as producing artwork for promotional material, the company brochure and merchandise for StormRider's first feature length movie, Written in Blood, for which he was tasked to completely redesign the artwork to be used for the DVD cover, disc design and inserts.
Since teaming up with Simon, Matt's artwork has played a big role in helping to generate enough investment money to fund filming of The Kaleidoscope Man. Filming is scheduled to start in early 2006 where Matt will continue to help concept and storyboard the film, create the matte paintings for some of the backdrops and work alongside some of the modellers, animators, set designers and other artists.
During his time working for StormRider films, Matt switched over from using Photoshop to Corel Painter and from using the mouse to a Wacom graphics tablet. The change over brought with it a huge improvement in his standard of work and an equally large cutback in completion time. The change was inspired after watching ' The Techniques of Ryan Church: Rendering Hi-Tech Architecture' on DVD, one of Matt's all-time favorite concept artists and a long-time advocate of Corel Painter. Making the transition from Photoshop to Painter, changing from a mouse to a graphics tablet and adopting a new style all at once proved to be a big but ultimately fruitful challenge. The gulf in his standard of work before and after the change proved to be huge. The first piece that Matt painted after making the change was entitled 'Ship Docking' and can be found here in the Colour Concept gallery.
After working on 'The Kaleidoscope Man', Matt has worked on a diverse number of projects ranging from corporate logo design to tabletop RPG illustration to Collectible Card Game (CCG) art.
One of the biggest achievements in Matt's professional career to date other than his film work was at 19 years of age, when he was commissioned by Shane Hensley and Zeke Sparkes of Pinnacle Entertainment Inc to produce three pieces of art for their upcoming 'flagship' gamebook, Deadlands Reloaded. Matt and I were both big fans of the Deadland's CCG, 'Doomtown', when we were younger. Our love for the game was largely down to the consistently brilliant artwork that was used to illustrate each and every card; in our opinion Deadland's easily sported the best artwork being used for any CCG at the time. For Matt to go from being a fan of the artwork to actually being involved in the creative process himself in such a short period of time was a great achievement and one with which we would never have anticipated back in the days when we used to play the game.
Like many artists, Matt aspires to, one day, be in the same league as the Ryan Church's, James Clyne's and Anry Nemo's of his generation and yet, despite his relative obscurity when compared to these concept art Gods, Matt has still had his fair number of unusual artistic requests. His girlfriend's dad wants him to design his next 'skull tattoo', his old race-track boss wanted him to design a 'flaming skeletal bird' transfer for his wife's motorbike and he is regularly approached by members of Deviant Art to work on all kinds of film concepts, cd covers, adventure games, books and game mods.
In recent months Matt has started to extend his artistic skills to the world of 3D modelling. There are very few artists who work in today's film and games industry who get to work solely in 2D and as such the need for artists to become accomplished in 3D is becoming paramount. Working closely with Andrew Brazier who, at the time, was working for Headfirst Productions as the lead artist on 'Call of Cthulhu: Destinys' End', Matt gained a lot of valuable advice with how best to use 3D Max with regards to low-poly modelling for the current generation of consoles. One of Matt's first attempts at low-poly 3D modelling and texture mapping can be seen on the right. Where possible Matt still prefers to work in 2D but hopes to gets some time in upcoming months to improve his 3D skills.
Most recently, Matt has been in contact with James Zhang of Massive Black, one of the biggest concept art companies in the world today. Based in San Francisco and being about as far away from the UK as is physically possible, Matt is hopefully set to start working from home as a freelance contractor for the company in 2006 where he will be working under the direction of Peter König.
König has worked as a concept artist, a sculptor, a designer and an animator on some of Hollywood's biggest blockbusters such as Starship Troopers, Evolution, Blade II, Dragonheart and Jurassic Park. Assuming that everything goes to plan, Matt will be working on orthographic drawings for König's own creature concepts. Although this will require a different way of working, Matt was asked to do a test ortho for Massive Black (shown left), proving that he is flexible enough to adapt to a new way of working.
What with 'The Kaleidoscope Man' finally being filmed and an increasing number of commissions coming in from high profile clients, 2006 is shaping up be a 'make-or-break' year for Matt and his ambitions to become a leading concept artist in the industry. Matt would like to thank the thousands of people who have shown an interest in his work through Deviant Art and his website. People like yourselves whose feedback and encouragement has been instrumental in my brother's growth as an artist over the last year or so. I hope that you will continue to support Matt in the future and continue to follow his work through the website; and by going to see 'The Kaleidoscope Man' when it is finally released, which I am sure, will be well worth your while!