30 Mar XR Artist Spotlight: Shelby Vecchio
Time has flown! It is hard to believe that four years have passed since Shelby first joined our team. Just like her repertoire of work, Shelby’s role within the team has grown ten-fold since then. Now, as art director, she is primarily responsible for establishing and upholding the art direction for each new project that we (or our gaming division, Amebous Labs) take on. To exercise her creativity and refine her world-building acumen, Shelby often jumps within Tilt Brush, an art application facilitating the creation of three-dimensional paintings and sculptures in VR.
Prior to her recent move to Germany and subsequent transition into fully remote work, we sat down with Shelby to celebrate her favorite extended reality (XR) Tilt Brush paintings and discover the inspirations that fueled their creation.
Shelby has always been interested in fine art—a passion that she’s explored for as long as she can remember. While pursuing her Bachelor’s Degree in New Media at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, she was exposed to many different mediums including (but not limited to): 2D animation, graphic design, web design, 3D character animation, and installation art. Interestingly, Shelby’s first VR experience would not take place in a classroom setting, but rather inside a VR bar, laying the foundations for her current career in XR design.
When asked how her educational background has influenced her VR paintings, Shelby explained one crucial way her background in fine arts has helped her complete XR paintings and sculptures: “my background is essential for creating XR art because I use the same brainstorming process to develop ideas in XR that I would for any traditional art piece.”
When it comes to creating new works of XR art, Shelby may seem like a pure natural; however, she would be the first to tell you that painting within extended reality took some getting used to. “It’s like learning a new language,” she explains. “You want to try to conform to the old way of saying things, before realizing that that won’t work in this new language.
“There was a learning curve in the beginning because, instead of just picking up a brush, I had to understand which commands the program required to display my thoughts. The more I practiced, the more I realized there are certain aspects of creating XR art that I prefer. In fine art, you are somewhat limited to the confines of the pieces you create, which are usually two-dimensional and have fixed perspectives. Digital art, on the other hand, is far more versatile, because it can be transformed within many other mediums. You can rip a piece apart, export it into another program, and edit it further, giving artists greater control over how they choose to express themselves.”
Shelby’s inspirations span the globe. While establishing the art direction for Loam Sandbox, Amebous Labs’ VR garden sim game, she looked toward Scandinavian themes of hygge (i.e., coziness) for inspiration, ensuring that every plant, critter, and piece of décor available in the game looks and feels comforting.
With influences from all over the world, it’s no surprise that Shelby is eager to start exploring all the art that Europe has to offer. When asked which places she’d like to visit the most, she told us how she “would love to wander the hills of the Netherlands where Vincent Van Gogh once painted or see the art installation commemorating the historic fall of the Berlin Wall. There is so much to explore—I will have to pace myself! I do not know much about German art movements, so that will be interesting to learn about!”
Follow Shelby on Instagram to see more pieces of her immersive artwork.
