Thank you! Well I never went to art school or had any formal design or videogame training. As a kid I tried to figure things on my own on the C64 back in France. Then more serious with the Atari ST, for which I made two games in the early 90’s.
Then dropped from college before moving to Montreal where I got my first real job as an environment modeler. I began to train myself in concept art and it was still a time when they would just give a shot to anyone showing interest. Then weaseled my way into art direction, which I’ve done since then for various studios in Canada and the U.S.
But the good thing about working in a studio is that I could learn along the way from plenty of smarter and more skilled people. I don’t feel like having any real expertise in any specific domain. My experience is just the kind of empiric knowledge you get from mimicking others and tinkering with anything that falls in your lap. But I’d rather craft small projects to try stuff and fail at my own pace. “Serious” production environment is formatted and frankly quite boring nowadays, and no one expects you to make any breakthrough, just to do that same thing that you do, in time and under budget. In my experience working in a videogame studio has very little to do with making videogames. I guess maybe that’s why most videogames don’t feel like videogames? Anyway that’s beside the point.
I don’t know if that answers your question. I feel like it was a very underwhelming and meandering answer. :)