Hamish Frater is an English artist who specializes in environmental design. He began his career designing environments at the Sony London Studio. Hamish now directs a small art team for Hutch Games, a mobile developer based out of Shoreditch London. As a concept artist, he designs with the theme that he is a problem solver and people pay for his ideas, rather than nice
pictures. He emphasizes having the ability to display your ideas in a way that is both appealing and clear, yet while producing an image that presents a solution to real world issues. Frater is often quoted as saying, “a great looking image that doesn’t solve the problem at hand or propose anything new and interesting is not useful.” Hamish finds that the world of concept art and illustration can feel generic at times due to how reliant they are on self-referencing. This is why he emphasizes taking inspiration from looking outside the art world and studying the world around you.
Concept artists often design environments that visualize what the future could possibly look like. The main ideas that Frater’s work encapsulate are mobile architecture and using parts off of other objects to serve a new purpose on a different object. This type of design can be difficult to make since you are designing things that are not real, yet should seem semi realistic and believable to the viewers. Hamish says in his blog, World Building in Roma, that the most
difficult part of designing these types of environments is maintaining a sense of scale and a believable perspective. When creating a conceptual environment, he starts by looking, listening, and smelling everyday things around him, and then starts sketching what he experienced. Once he has a few sketches, Hamish begins to mash up the sketches. He does this by connecting, joining, placing one sketch on top/next to another, and jamming sketches into one another. Next, Frater begins to think about the different materials in his sketches and how the meet each other when multiple sketches are put together. Finally, how people would occupy the resulting structure is considered and further adjustments are made.
Although many of these conceptual images are never made into real life objects, their message is all about the ideas and statements that they represent. Hamish Frater’s works often offer an idea to the future of machinery, especially as Artificial Intelligence advances. This can be seen particularly in his works Big Fella, Desert Walker, and Transport Walker. In these, he
suggests machines that could transport goods similar to
how humans use animals to do so. He shows these
machines as being made out of reused metal and other
reused materials. This provides an interesting aesthetic
because it shows a machine that does not exist and has
futuristic technology, but it looks to be made out of old and worn out materials. He designs this way to share the idea that most examples of new technology provide ways to
improve upon old things that humans have done for many
years. Although some of this technology is vital to our future, Frater is suggesting that they need to consider the maintenance and operation of the machine. If machines are built with maintenance and operation in mind, they will last longer and prove to be more sustainable by reducing the materials needed and the number of units that need to be produced.
Works Cited
“What Is a Concept Artist?” Concept Art Empire, 14 Feb. 2018, conceptartempire.com/what-is concept-artist/.
“Hamish Frater.” ArtStation, www.artstation.com/hamfish.
Admin. “Projects.” HAMISH FRATER, 26 Jan. 2019, hamishfrater.com/.
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