Santa Monica, CA
I'm a 3D artist by trade and by hobby, and take a lot of inspiration from the other subjects i'm interested in. Having recently (in the last year) gotten pretty heavy into pinball, naturally that has rubbed off on my creative side quite a bit. I really love old rusty vintage neon signs, and decided to create a series of designs based on some of my favorite pinball machines. Attack From Mars, Monster Bash, and Medieval Madness are some of my go-tos, and happen to form a nice little trio for a project series.
I started in 2D, borrowing various assets from the machines and re-designing them to form an interesting sign. AFM was the first one I did and was really happy with the overall concept of the UFO rays forming the support beams of the sign. I admit I got a bit carried away with the other two, trying to incorporate way too much into the designs, but I'm still pretty happy with the range of styles.
After I had the 2D designs down, I started building them in 3D and adding all the grunge and texture you'd expect to see in old aging signs. I use 3D Studio Max, VRay, and Fusion for my work.
I like to leave a lot of the interpretation of my work up to the viewer. A vivid imagination is required to create any type of art, and I like to create images that will jog other people's imagination as well (haha I dunno maybe that's the definition of art). To me these kind of feel like signs you'd find outside the entrance to a roller-coaster or something, but i'm curious what comes to mind when other people see them!
Make sure to view these in their fullest resolution if you can, as they're quite large. If you'd rather browse the images on my website rather than the links below, you can see them here: http://www.toddkumpf.com/#/imagined-neon/
AFM_WIP_15.jpg
MG_Sign_WIP_03.jpg
MM_Sign_WIP_04.jpg
AFM_WIP_14_C-01.jpg
AFM_WIP_14_B.jpg
pinball_sign_collection_03.jpg
MB_Sign_WIP_01_C.jpg
MB_Sign_WIP_01_D.jpg
(although that does sound pretty neat too, to be honest. If you're going to hang an old playfield on a wall, creating a neon sign out of it would be a pretty rad way to do it. I wonder if anybody has done that.)
Kitchener, ON
