I’m James Taylor!

I’m currently teaching 3D art at the university level. Before that, I worked in the video game industry for nearly 10 years, where I worked on at least 23 different games. I’ve done web design and traditional animation, too! I keyframed stuff that ended up on MTV’s Liquid Television.

All told, I’ve got almost 20 years of professional experience doing this kind of thing. Put in another way, I first used Maya when it was still called Power Animator, and if you can believe it, it was even less user-friendly than it is now.

In my position I see a lot of students, a lot of art, and a lot of portfolios. Through the years I’ve seen the same mistakes cropping up again and again. This all has led me to creating this site, a resource I could steer students to, instead of getting frustrated of feeling and sounding like a broken record.

What mistakes, you may ask?

Some of it is technical (3D software and the like aren’t intuitive,) some of it is aesthetic (it is hard to make good art when you’re focused on wrestling with a program like Maya or ZBrush,especially ZBrush,) some of it is stylistic (students choose the same subject matter over and over, which is a surefire way to NOT stand out when it comes to finding a job,) and finally some of it is academic, (related to the nature of school itself.)

As a professor there are plenty of things I simply cannot address in class, such as, giving honest portfolio reviews. A portfolio is the big takeaway from college, and if it isn’t up to par, finding a job will be next to impossible. There are a ton of very talented competitors out there, you need the best portfolio you can possibly have.

I don’t have enough time in class to go over all this stuff, and in a lot of classes it isn’t related to the course material at all, so I’ve created this site as a catch-all for that sort of golden information.

This is for you.

If you are thinking about becoming an artist in the game or VFX industry; if you’re currently studying to do so; or if you’re still trying to land your first gig, this site has the information that you need to know. Welcome to MethodJ.com!