James Downing

This month's banner artist is James Downing (who, by pure coincidence, was in the year below last month's artist Aiden Barret at uni). We (virtually) pulled him out of his cave in Leeds to talk to him about indie games, redesigning The Beatles' album covers and the use of confusion as a viable defence mechanism.

Who are you? What do you do? And where?
My name is James Downing, i'm a billion years old, and I give wacky answers to questions to create the illusion of being an interesting person. I do painting, drawings, and digital pictures in my studio, which is also my bedroom, in Leeds.

How is the Leeds art scene at the moment? Do you feel that the art world is too London centric?
It definitely exists but it's very much shadowed by it's music scene. I'd say a lot of it is aimed more at fine artists than designers, or maybe i'm not looking hard enough. It might just be relative, I mean, London's a big place so its going to have a lot going on... but theres definitely room for improvement over here, and in the North generally.

Who or what are your inspirations?
In terms of other artists, I appreciate a lot of contempoaray illustrators like Pete Fowler, Jon Burgerman, Jim Woodring, Marc Bell and such. I'm heavily influenced by a lot of Japanese culture, particularly video games. Also, a lot of the doodley artwork I do is pretty much a stream of consciousness, so in that respect i'm influened by whatever is on my mind or whatevers right in front of me.

There's been a lot of experimentation in games recently. Are there any games that have recently caught your eye because of their art direction?
The other week I downloaded a game called The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom on Xbox Live. It manages to have this Tim Burton / Edward Gorey story book look to it without being massively cliché. Also there are a series of "Artstyle" games you can download for the DS. One of them, Picopict, lets you build up tetris-lke blocks and convert them into the pixels of retro Nintendo sprites, while remixed 8 bit "classics" are played over the top. I love that most consoles are offering smaller downloadable titles, it's allowing developers to take more risks and play about a bit more. I'd say the best looking games I've ever played are Katamari Damacy and Zelda: The Wind Waker.

    

What are you currently working on?
At the moment i'm trying to recreate all The Beatles' album covers in my own style. Some of them are pretty straightforward, but Sgt Pepper is really going to let me go wild. I have no idea how i'm going to make the white album look interesting, but i'll figure that one out when I come to it I guess! I'm also attempting to create a semi-coherent comic book. Expect plenty of thinly disguised rants about things I don't like (which is a lot of things).

Have you ever been in a fight? And if so, what happened?
Haha, not really! I'm really passive aggressive but physically I don't know what i'm doing at all. I remember when I was about 11 or 12 this guy in my class at school was trying to get a rise out of me, so I stepped up to him, realised I had no idea what I was doing, pulled his hat off and threw it on the floor, then just kinda stood there. He was confused by the whole ordeal and left it at that, so perhaps I won by default...?

We'd like to thank James for taking part in the banner design this month. If you fancy checking out more of his work (or even show some ultra-support and buy some of his pieces) head over to his, fairly mental, website at
http://www.couk-art.co.uk/