About

Hi there, it’s Dar­ren here, wel­come to my website. As you’ve clicked my ‘about’ page, I’ll assume you want to learn a lit­tle more about me, so here’s my back­ground in a nutshell…

Born in Sin­ga­pore, I migrated to a sleepy lit­tle Aus­tralian city called Ade­laide with my par­ents when I was 5 years old. I went through a rel­a­tively reg­u­lar child­hood here…primary school, sec­ondary school, high school, they all passed at a pretty non-chalant pace. Look­ing back now, I real­ize I cer­tainly enjoyed paint­ing and draw­ing more than other chil­dren, but other than that, there wasn’t much to sep­a­rate me from my peers and my artis­tic nature wasn’t encour­aged beyond recreation.

When I entered Uni­ver­sity, it was to study Com­puter Sci­ence and Man­age­ment, rather than art, the lat­ter of which was deemed to have lim­ited career poten­tial. I sup­pose it was the respectable thing to do, but truth be told, I never enjoyed study­ing those dry text books on sub­jects that had no bear­ing on my own real­ity. When I grad­u­ated, it was into pro­fes­sions that held no long term attrac­tion for me…it always felt like there had to be more to life than sell­ing stuff that I could care less about.

One day while I was brows­ing ran­dom sites killing time, I stum­bled across some­thing called con­cept art. It never occurred to me that things in movies and games needed to be designed, but it looked like I had stum­bled across what I still con­sider to be my dream career, design­ing cool stuff and get­ting paid to do it! Look­ing around for schools to teach me the ways of con­cept art, I found none, so I did the next best thing and ordered a few instruc­tional DVDs from the Gno­mon Work­shop and started to teach myself how to do it by trial and error. It cer­tainly seemed like a mon­u­men­tal hill to climb, but learn­ing about art was just plain enjoy­ment for me, noth­ing serious.

The turn­ing point came one day while I was at my day job, man­ning the phones. It hadn’t rang all day, I was just sit­ting and gaz­ing out of the office win­dow at the gor­geous sky out­side and real­ized that the thing I loved most about that job was pack­ing up for the day and dri­ving home. That night, I decided to get seri­ous about my art and started to com­mit more and more time to art mak­ing. After 6 months of inten­sive art study, I mirac­u­lously man­aged to land my first con­cept art posi­tion and the rest as they say, was history.

Six years on, I am still at it, grow­ing artis­ti­cally and lov­ing my career more than when I started. These days, I’m a free­lance con­cept artist work­ing from my home stu­dio in Mel­bourne for var­i­ous clients and also teach con­cept art to sec­ond year game art stu­dents at RMIT University. I absolutely love that I get to draw stuff for a liv­ing, to work with amaz­ing peo­ple on a reg­u­lar basis and to make a dif­fer­ence in other people’s lives through teaching.

Please get in touch with me via the Con­tact Page if you need art­work or would like some pri­vate tutoring. While, I often have a lot on my plate, I also love inter­act­ing with peo­ple and I’ll endeavor to respond to mes­sages in a timely manner.

Keep art­ing and I’ll catch you soon.

Dar­ren Yeow