Early years

Greg’s fascination with art began at a very young age, as he recalls: “My earliest memories are of drawing these huge battlefields filled with tanks, soldiers and explosions on A1 pieces of cardboard my Grandad would get me from the paper mill. He would bring me heaps of comics with the covers ripped off, dumped by magazine retailers. Mad magazines, Commando comics, Batman, Spiderman, and more pivotally for me 2000AD. I always drew, it’s just what I did. I never thought I’d do anything else but drive a tank or draw comics.”

The human figure has also featured in Greg’s art from the very beginning. This started off with drawing heaps of soldiers, fueled by his fascination with World War 2. “I still draw a lot of dudes with guns. That shit is just ingrained.” He also has an affinity towards portraying robots, and he finds that this serves as a helpful aid in understanding the human form. “I love drawing robots and ultimately, for me, that’s an exercise in drawing human form anyway. A robot to me is a caricature of a person, an attitude, or snapshot of some human attribute embodied by machinery. It’s a liberating way of drawing people. The fact that robots are supposed to be emotionless representations of humans makes it fun to play with any projected emotion or attitude that you put into it. That (excuse the rising art wankery) juxtaposition of concepts is appealing.”

Greg’s early sources of inspiration continue to influence him to this very day. Dinosaurs, tanks and robots still dominate his art, although he says that maybe curvy women feature a little more nowadays than when he was a boy.

Apart from high school, a year in a grossly unsuitable polytech commercial art course and a failed half year in fine arts at Wanganui, Greg has not had any formal art training. However, an early start combined with childhood sources of inspiration and years of solid drawing have brought him up to the level that he is at today. “Draw all the time, get a Wacom tablet and Photoshop (or a pencil and paper) and draw all the time. It just takes perseverance, as corny as it sounds, to get the skills – the rest is imagination. Draw lots of crazy shit.”

Career
“I Spent many years on the dole, from my late teens until my mid to late twenties, getting hassled by the welfare people continuously. During that time I played in metal and punk bands, travelled a lot around Aotearoa, drew a lot, but probably focused more on music. Drawing was fun but I never thought to use it as a career at the time. I decided to grow up a little and get a day job, that lasted a few years and I decided to give illustration a stab, I had done a few small jobs, and thought drawing for kid’s books would be fun, so I approached Learning Media. I got fobbed off for a year or more, but eventually got a start and ended up doing more than 30 books for them. Some full books, mostly little stories in books with multiple stories. I still do jobs for them now and then, but don’t really have the spare time to take them on. I had an epiphany one day and thought, ‘why the fuck don’t you send a folio to Weta Workshop?’ Luckily Richard liked my moxie and gave me a job and I now work fulltime as a concept designer. I’ve been doing that for five years or so.”

Greg’s time at Weta Workshop has undoubtedly been the best part of his career, as this is where he had the opportunity to participate in his most favourite projects to date. “Working on King Kong was a major for me. I love illustrating Dinosaurs, It was what I was mainly drawing before I was employed at Weta Workshop. So, as a commercial job, that was a real high point. Drawing T-rexes and Triceratops all day for months on end, awesome. What a nerd. We created a book off the back of that called The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island which used a lot of this concept work, plus I got to do many, many more illustrations. That was great too, although it was a difficult time, and really had it’s ups and downs emotionally. Overall it was a great thing to achieve, so I was really fucking proud to be a part of it. One thing I never thought about before working at Weta was the thrill you get when your drawings come to life, either as a prop, a prosthetic, an environment or a creature (CG or practical). It’s pretty fucking cool to see.”

More recently, Greg has just finished work on Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory which he wrote and illustrated at the Workshop. Greg describes it as “massively satisfying to complete. It’s part catalogue of bizarre science fiction Ray guns/contraptions and part comic book. I modeled it after the Sears and Roebucks catalogues of the early 20th century” The initial idea for the Raygun pieces stemmed from a series of acrylic paintings on canvas that Greg did at home. These paintings were subsequently pitched to Richard Taylor of Weta Worshop, who was searching for ideas for possible collectables. “He loved them and wanted to push Weta’s own original ideas, so we’ve made them, and they kick arse. I pitched that we make them as real metal replicas, like antiques of old firearms. It’s freaking cool to pick these things up, they just look and feel real, that’s an amazing thing, to go from something that was simply a painting to a solid tangible object.” Doctor Grordbort’s Contrapulatronic Dingus Directory will hopefully be published shortly.

The evolution of Greg’s illustration and concept art career has exposed him to both to the world of freelancing and the studio environment. Greg explains: “Freelancing is scary in that the work can dry up at any time, but working from home is awesome. I love the freedom. On the other hand, working at a studio, like Weta Workshop, where you are surrounded by stupidly creative people with world-class skill, different techniques etc. is invaluable. It can sometimes be hard to concentrate, but any way that you can work where you can feed off friends and fellow artists is going to have a really positive affect on your work. In the end, they both have great advantages, I really look forward to working alone as much as I appreciate working with others.”

While not everyone will land a gig with Weta Workshop, Greg notes the importance of the internet as a promotional tool for young New Zealand-based illustrators who are just starting out: “There aren’t a lot of jobs in this industry locally, so as far as finding a position at a place like Weta, it’s difficult. But with the internet, as shit as it is in Aotearoa at the moment, it’s entirely possible to work as a freelancer or even better drive and create your own projects, then deliver that content, whether it be TV, film, Videogames, internet cartoons or comics, whatever, to the world.”

With regards to possible future work: “I love doing film work, having a director with great and ambitious vision like Peter Jackson or Neill Blomkamp is fantastic. But ultimately I enjoy creating my own worlds and this is something I’ll be focusing more on.”

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