Christopher Schiefer on the Importance of Advice and Guidance

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Christopher Schiefer is a young Concept Artist, currently living in Chemnitz, Germany. Surprisingly, Christopher first discovered digital whilst he was working his old job way back in 2012. “I was working as a Graphics Programmer and a Technical Artist before I knew about Digital painting.” He told us. After that, he would go on to spend the next four years creating over a thousand paintings. Christopher was working tirelessly to improve through continued practice, art courses and a mentorship with none other than Wojtek Fus. If you take a look at the things he produced in 2012 – comparing it to the work he’s doing now – you’ll see that hard work really does pay off. His new artworks – the ones like Crescendo and Grand Staircase – are absolutely stunning and we asked him to walk us through how he made them.

Simon Kopp About the Difference Between Concept Art for Film and Games

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Simon Kopp is a twenty-nine year old Concept Artist and Illustrator from Heilbad Heiligenstadt, Germany. He is one of the up and coming artists in the games industry, getting his first time in the spotlight back when Airborne Studios first released the concept art for the critically acclaimed Ori and the Blind Forest, and not letting go of it ever since. Kopp has since worked with world–renowned game developers like Insomniac Games, as well as having been published in several books by 3dtotal. His most recent project was an animated feature film – Maya the Bee – The Honey Games.

Stella Chen Yui: Art Is Not a Competition

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Stella Chen Yui is an illustrator from Taiwan, currently living in Taichung and using the pen name of Stellarism. She is completely self-taught and is majoring in Japanese language this year. Of course, you may have already seen Stella’s artworks around if you are a fan of anime and manga since she’s one of the more popular artists in that Internet community. However, she also does her best to try her hand at different projects. We asked her about the work she did for Marco Kalantari’s short film toward the second half of the interview, and she told us a little bit about how different it was to working for Taiwanese clients. Of course, we also talked about her journey so far and her plans for the future.

Jakub Rozalski About His Plans for the Future

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Jakub Rozalski is a Concept Artist and Illustrator from Krakow, Poland. He has a deep interest in history, and a lot of his personal projects are based around important historical events that occurred in the twentieth century. You can see that 1920+ is the most popular project by far. This is because of the amazing world-building that Rozalski worked on for many years now. The project was so successful that Scythe (a board game based off of the 1920+ world) was successfully funded on Kickstarter, with thousands of people pledging over $1,800,000 in order to make the product a reality.

Concept Art Culture with James Combridge

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Becoming a successful concept artist in this day and age is tough. You have to spend countless hours creating portfolio artwork whilst growing your social media presence in order to build your professional network. And like most of our dreams, it will seem impossible at first. This is why we interviewed James Combridge, an Australian Concept Artist from Newcastle. James loves creating worlds, telling stories and constantly improving his artwork. We asked him a few questions we thought a beginner artist might want answers to.

Henrik Evensen: I couldn’t Sleep One Night

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Henrik Evensen is a twenty-six year old Digital Artist from Norway. He is currently working at Storyline Studios, a small post-production company that does work on local live-action films, TV series and commercials. Evensen is given lots of different tasks over at Storyline and he’s become a very versatile artist because of it. He says: “I’m a generalist, doing anything from concept-art and matte painting to modeling, rendering, you name it!” During the interview, he told us that he worked there for two years now, and did six months of freelance work prior to that.

Florian Aupetit: Father & Son no Longer Just a Pipe Dream

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Florian Aupetit is an Art Director and 3-D Generalist from Paris, France. Currently, he works at a small design and production studio named Monsieur K where he hopes to learn more about CGI to help him realize his dream of creating an animated short. In the interview, he tells us that Father & Son is a personal project he has been developing in his spare time for two years now, and that this is the project he wants to make the short film for. Of course, making this a reality is really tough considering that he has a full-time job and is still learning digital painting. But it is no longer just a pipe dream as him and his friend have finalized a script and most of the scenarios have actually been drawn up and made into illustrations. We hope, in short, that an animated film will be released in the near future.

Jean Brice Dugait About Making a Good Platformer

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Jean Brice Dugait is a freelance entertainment artist, currently living in Montpellier, France. He has worked on a number of successful video game franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Rayman at Ubisoft before moving on to contributing to Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition at Moon Studios. Unfortunately, Jean wasn’t too happy with the world-building aspect of the Assassin’s Creed project he was doing, he said that “It’s a great franchise, I just wasn’t happy working on that kind of world[…]” And went on to tell us that when he heard that Moon Studios were looking for artists to help on the definitive edition of Ori, he knew that that’s where he wanted to go next.

How To Paint a Portrait of Your Favourite Game Composer

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I have a love-hate relationship with tutorials promising the secrets to drawing idyllic flaxen locks, glossy anime eyeballs, or more abstract themes like “how to draw scifi”. It’s well-intentioned that others are trying to get people’s art from point A to point B or build excitement over creating in general, but they will never teach those people how to see. In my experience, drawing is far more seeing with your brain than it is drawing with your hand. Anyone needing honest titles for tutorials should consider something like “How I Drew Something That Was Scifi.” When I do tutorials on creating good artwork, they end up being abstract, nonlinear, and involve steps like…

Timothy Rodriguez on Why Personal Art Is Crucial

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Since he was a teenager, Timothy Rodriguez knew he wanted to do digital art. The artist grew up in La Rochelle, France and later moved to Paris where he attended École de communication visuelle – a private design school – before dropping out after one year and starting freelance in the city. He is now an artist with years’ of experience who has worked for several renowned companies like Applibot, Bethesda Softworks and Warner Bros. Rodriguez also had the opportunity to work on popular franchises like The Elder Scrolls among others. Of course, he also works on some great personal art and he will share with us today why this is important for any artist who hopes to be successful.