Conference sessions at GDC are a core part of the experience for many attendees. Game companies have been known to shut down for the week of GDC and send their entire team. The keynotes were abundant this year, and were dubbed Track Keynotes, to coincide with the different creative and technical tracks the conference uses to help attendees figure out what will interest them. Ian McCaig was the GDC Visual Arts Keynote, and performed a fantastic exercise in creativity with creating characters. In a variety of exercises, McCaig taught the audience how to think in more free form ways, draw spontaneously, and start from simple shapes like three eggs or draw a character from the feet up.
Artists concentrate on faces because they are such a source of visual interaction.
McCaig explained that artists tend to make the face almost disproportionate to the body when they draw it first. It was an inspirational and fun keynote, and McCaig ended it with a simple statement. Now go home and draw. Even though the sessions, classes, and so forth tend to lean to the technical side, there are still many offerings for the art side of game development teams. Realtime 3D is becoming more and more popular, and games are traditionally where it all begins.