Bill Davis (artist)
American artist (born 1949)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Robert Davis (born May 1949) is an Emmy Award-winning American illustrator, animation director, graphic designer, and painter. Davis received his Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences for his work on NBC's The First 50 Years: A Closer Look in 1978. He was creative director at Sierra On-Line from 1989 to 1996, where he brought film production methods such as storyboarding and hand-drawn animation into the company's PC games.
- Adventure games
- fine art painting
Bill Davis | |
|---|---|
Davis in 2007 | |
| Born | May 1949 (age 77) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupations | Artist, creative director |
| Known for |
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| Spouse | Betty Tikker Davis |
Davis was later the creative director at Rocket Science Games and founded Mother Productions, a graphic design firm.[1] Since the 2000s, he has painted under the artistic persona Trowzers Akimbo, focusing on landscapes of Yosemite National Park and the surrounding Sierra Nevada region.
Early life
Davis was born in May 1949 in downtown Los Angeles and raised in the coastal community of Venice.[2] He is the oldest of five children in a family with strong artistic traditions—both his mother and maternal grandfather were artists.[2]
Career
Davis attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he graduated in 1971 with a BFA degree and high honors.
Television
Davis was a lead graphic designer for NBC and received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences for his animated title and segue films on NBC, The First 50 Years: A Closer Look in 1978.[3] He created over 200 "More to Come" on-air slides for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and he designed the logo for The Gong Show.[4] Later, Davis worked as an animation director and designer for Kurtz & Friends.[citation needed]
Sierra On-Line
Bill Davis was appointed vice-president of development and the first creative director of Sierra On-Line in July 1989.[5]
By the late 1980s, Sierra On-Line, led by Ken Williams, had adopted technologies such as CD-ROMs, sound cards, and VGA displays, which let the company's games look and sound more like animated or live-action films. Davis was recruited from Hollywood to adapt Sierra's production techniques to these capabilities.[6]
Davis introduced storyboarding, adapted from film production, into Sierra's game development, which enabled production teams to grow without lengthening project timelines. Artists worked in traditional media, drawing backgrounds and animations by hand before scanning them into games, in place of the low-resolution digital methods then prevalent, and introduced animation techniques such as rotoscoping and squash and stretch. He established the role of art director at Sierra and began outsourcing animation work to international studios, a practice borrowed from the traditional animation industry.[6]
Davis advocated a consistent art style within each series, a shift from earlier practices in which only each title had a distinct look, and encouraged matching a game's artistic style to its thematic tone.[6] For example, Davis explored cubism for Leisure Suit Larry to reflect its quirky tone, persuading creator Al Lowe to adopt a cartoonish style that emphasized the game's wild visual humor.[7]
Other pursuits
In 1996, Davis left Sierra to become vice-president of development and creative director for Rocket Science Games.[8]
Trowzers Akimbo
Since the 2000s, Davis has maintained an active fine art practice under the artistic persona Trowzers Akimbo.[9] Working primarily as a landscape painter, he focuses on Yosemite National Park and the surrounding Sierra Nevada region, often painting on location.[9]
Personal life
Davis lives in Oakhurst, California with his wife, Betty Tikker Davis.[10]