Andrew Walsh

Artist Biography: Andrew Walsh was born in Camden, Arkansas in 1999. He took an interest in video games from a young age, and in his teenage years, this interest shifted from simply playing games to an interest in creating them. He became focused on landscapes and the environments in games, especially studying those of large open-world games such as Xenoblade Chronicles and Breath of the Wild.

He and his family have a tradition of taking a long road-trip vacation each summer to places like Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, and The Smokey Mountains, among other places. This gave him experience observing environments different from the ones he grew up in and created an interest to see more regions. He began to spend time on google earth, looking at the world from both the sky to understand a lay of the land and by zooming in to street view to see how different areas looked from a human perspective.

In high school, he took engineering classes that gave him some experience with 3D modeling software, and this helped him embrace similar tools he learned in college. While in college, he picked up photography and recognized it as both a useful tool to document environments that he traveled to in person, and as an enjoyable hobby that could easily become a backup career if needed between game design jobs.

In his works, he focusses not just on objects that would be found in an environment but also on the larger environment itself. He creates colorful landscapes of immense size and fills them with various props to make the environments feel alive. Through his photography, he captures reference for himself and experiments with how light and color can enhance all his works of any form.