Paul Hatton learns about the projects that have defined the artist’s career, and his early beginnings creating in 3D
ARTIST BIO
Cornelius Dämmrich Cornelius is a 3D artist from Germany, who specialises in CG environments using a combination of software and tools. corneliusdammrich.com
Cornelius Dämmrich was born in 1989 in East Berlin and is a self ‐taught 3D artist currently living in Cologne, Germany. He made his first digital steps at age six when drawing Michael Denio’s Captain Comic in an early version of PC Paint, and went on to study communication and graphic design. His portfolio includes several published and awarded 3D artworks, far-future concepts for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and works for clients like Atlantic Records and BMW.
I understand that you got into the world of 3D as a teenager. What were those early years like for you?
I liked technology and I was always the creative type, but there wasn’t really any thought of going anywhere with that. Just like playing games, I played with Cinema 4D and Photoshop, and never gave it a second thought. Mainly speaking German at that time and only having poor English skills, I was active in three or four German online forums covering graphic design or ‘GFX’, as it was called back then.
Most of the people my age would build these very technicallooking machines that were made out of hundreds of different layers using Photoshop. We called them ‘interfaces’, and although they looked like skins for the music player Winamp, they never had any functionality. They were just made to look cool.
With time, these interests shifted more to 3D, and I just kept being active in all of these forums. There was a general understanding that something like this was used to make films, but this was still so far away from me and my friends that we never thought of it as something you would pursue as a career. The driving factor behind all of this was curiosity, and the feeling that it felt like magic when something that you’d try actually ended up working.
Over the years, who have been your main sources of inspiration and motivation?
There are many, many things that inspire me. This can be random discoveries on Tumblr blogs or Pinterest, to the artwork of other artists. Right now, my favourite digital artists are Colorsponge, Friendly Robot, Piotr Jabłonski, Marek Denko and a whole lot of others. I think motivation is something you learn with time.
In my growth as a digital artist, I learned that certain things will just take time and projects that would’v
