Jake Gumbleton is an English artist and the creator of Vessels, a science fiction graphic novel and NFT series depicting the remnants of humanity surviving on an alien planet.,He has also worked as a concept artist and art director in the video game industry for over two decades.His personal fine art practice also includes Eco Series, exploring the climate emergency.
Gumbleton has a fine art background and has worked professionally as an artist for over 24 years, moving between animation, video games, television, publishing, tabletop gaming and film.His concept art and character art credits include Second Sight in 2004, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect in 2005 and the GoldenEye 007 games, and he later worked as an art director at Axis Animation on the Destiny 2 and Halo Infinite franchises.,He later combined his daily traditional paintings with techniques from his games and animation career to create Eco Series, exploring the climate emergency and humanity's inability to address it.
When NFTs emerged Gumbleton was drawn to them despite early concerns about their ecological footprint, and he found a home for his work on Hic et Nunc, the Tezos-based platform where he released Vessels entirely as NFTs. Vessels tells the story of a scattered human society forced to migrate to an alien planet after abandoning an uninhabitable Earth, its characters clinging to ageing, salvaged technology. Gumbleton describes both the human colonists and the machinery that carries them as “vessels of a great power”, tying the series' title to his own concern for the climate emergency.In 2022 he introduced GEN-0, a generative PFP project of 5,000 characters portraying teenagers raised in the Vessels colony, planned for minting on the Versum platform on Tezos.He has also reimagined characters from Alexander Hare's StarPunch project in his own painterly style.
