Catch-up Interview With Florian Aupetit

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After our first interview in the summer of 2016, Florian Aupetit’s life would change completely. He had two great job offers lined up in September of that same year. One of them asked him to be an art director on a feature film, and the other was The SPA Studios inviting him to be the lighting supervisor on Klaus (2019). Sadly, even though he loved what art directors Szymon Biernacki and Marcin Jakubowski were telling him about Klaus, he rejected it. Accepting that job would mean moving to Madrid by January 2017, whereas the feature film project would allow him to comfortably…

What Does It Take To Be a Successful Concept Artist?

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Jourdan Tuffan is a senior concept artist at Atomhawk Design over in Newcastle. Originally from Jakarta, Indonesia, he moved to England in 2017 and has since been hard at work improving both, his art and professionalism. During our interview, we found that he’s incredibly passionate about teaching, and you can often find him sharing valuable knowledge on his Twitch channel or on The Drawing Table Podcast which he co-hosts with Ken Darmadi. For our talk together, we chose to focus on the career aspect of a concept artist’s life. So if you’re new to all of this, or perhaps you just graduated from a games art course, our talk with Jourdan is definitely going to be a worthwhile listen…

Discovering Abstract Art With Gaya Karapetyan

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Our new interview with Gaya Karapetyan is the first time Vox Groovy ever approached abstract art. This time, we’ll be moving away from the world of AAA games, art directors, and tight deadlines, and more towards a freer place where people express their feelings and experiences through wondrous combinations of flowing colour and shape. Earlier on in the year, we spoke about the art of Hilma af Klint on our radio […]

Quitting Job, Taking the Leap of Faith, Super Stressed, Not Burning to Cinder…

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Julien Gauthier is a French concept artist who’s currently working at Industrial Light & Magic. Because France is well known for its 3D-oriented art schools, he chose one of the more renowned ones and studied for four years, learning everything he’d need to know before setting off to work at a big studio. After graduating, he was a lighting technical director for Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) in London, and shortly after, he’d be on his way to Paris, then Vancouver, and finally Singapore.

Gaëlle Seguillon on Concept Art for Visual Effects

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Gaëlle Seguillon is a French concept artist and matte painter who specializes in the creation of digital environments. Some of her recent projects at ILM include blockbuster films like Aladdin (2019), Ready Player One (2018) and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). For her first job in the entertainment industry, she worked as a junior at MPC, and she was lucky enough to work on a highly ambitious shot early on in her career. It was a beautiful vista of the city in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) that was given to her because there were no senior artists available. Safe to say that Gaëlle nailed it despite the pressure, telling us that, “the team loved it so much they made it their wallpaper!”

Quy Ho on His Humble Beginnings and Work at Riot Games

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Quy Ho’s journey to becoming a concept artist wasn’t easy. Conflicting ideas and inner voices pushed this aspiration aside for a long, long time. But despite that, once he realized that nothing else is as important and that he will eventually find himself doodling in his sketchbook anyway, he came to a decision and pursued a career in entertainment art. In the beginning, he barely knew how to draw and needed to work on a few other skills like communication and being held accountable, but concept art began to show promise in due time. The process wasn’t easy and took a lot of time, but eventually, certain clients kept coming back, the tiny commissions grew to be big projects, and the door to Riot was finally open.

Ignatius Tan and The Spirit of Miyazaki

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Ignatius Tan is an Illustration Art Lead on Legends of Runeterra at Riot Games in Hong Kong. He grew up in Singapore, and as a kid, found influences in Studio Ghibli, old-school anime, and western animations like He-Man, X-Men and the ninja turtles. The signature style of Ghibli is most noticeable when you scroll through his portfolio where artworks and sketches celebrating Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away catch your attention almost immediately. It’s fun to see how the spirit of Miyazaki’s animated films lives on, shining through in the art of a whole generation of illustrators like the one we’ve interviewed here.

The Art of Natalie Kayurova

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Natalie Kayurova is a twenty-seven-year-old artist from Kamchatka–a 1,250-kilometre-long peninsula in the Russian Far East, also known as an “artist from the far corners of the Earth.” Here, she grew up among brown bears, breathtaking nature, and fiery volcanoes. While studying painting, she worked with traditional materials like oils, pastels, and sketching pencils. The games industry came into Natalie’s life right alongside computer graphics, which is when her existing approach met with CG, making something completely new. She’s got seven years’ worth of experience…

Tomislav Jagnjic and His World of Mysterious Giants

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Tomislav Jagnjic is a Serbian Concept Artist and Illustrator whose personal project already impressed thousands of people online this year. The world of mysterious giants that he’s built found its inception when he decided that the environment art we see on ArtStation simply isn’t enough. It needed to be more engaging than just a lone figure with an imaginary landscape to explore, so he chose to throw a handful of charming storytelling elements into the mix. His artworks go along with funny and lighthearted titles, which makes for a pretty fun experience when you first see a piece by him. But when did Tomislav discover his passion for art? When we asked, he told…

Zac Retz: The Nobility of Hard Work Brings Us Higher

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“Could we get much higher? Could we get much lighter?” We are a radio too, meaning we put the music on the pedestal right next to the stories we publish. Listening to “In high Places” sung by John Roy Anderson while reading through this interview clicked! We have just read that we can. Zac Retz is an artist who truly lives for his art, and our talk with him will give you a peek at his inspiring philosophy. Because it’s really the thousands of hours spent hard at work that will get us into the studios we dream about, and in his case, the practice helped him to become an art director at DreamWorks Animation…