Igor Staritsin On the World of Visual Effects

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Igor Staritsin is a known concept artist and matte painter in the world of visual effects. He started working in the industry back in 2008 for Disney. Since then Igor contributed to over 50 films and video game cinematics, including projects such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Jurassic World and Ant Man. Igor was a part of the VES Award winning team for Outstanding Visual Effects on Maleficent in 2015 as well as Asian Film Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Gone with the Bullets. Igor’s artworks were featured…

Kamila Szutenberg on Building Fantastical Worlds

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Kamila Szutenberg is a Polish freelance concept artist currently living in Germany. In the past, she had the opportunity to work with studios such as Warner Bros., Wizards of the Coasts, PUBG, Bethesda and many others. When we interviewed her, she said that “I completely fell in love with creating worlds.” Concept art is an essential part of worldbuilding, be it for a book, movie or video game. By creating environments, characters and objects that blend seamlessly together, Kamila’s art is a beautiful invitation to explore…

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…

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!”

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…

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…

Winona Nelson on Sharing the Ojibwe Tribe’s Stories Through Art

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Winona Nelson grew up in Duluth, Minnesota—a place where she’d spend the better part of her early life drawing and painting before moving away to study classical realism and art for the entertainment industry at the Safehouse Atelier in San Francisco. After that, Winona found herself working at both Flagship studios and Planet Moon Studios, giving her the experience she needed to become a successful freelancer.

Vadim Shchepilov About the Art of Ori and the Will of the Wisps

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Vadim Shchepilov was born and raised in Ukraine, which is where he’d spend most of his youth dreaming about becoming a graphic designer while working his day job. Once he learned to use Photoshop, he realized that this kind of software could be used for personal art as well, and like many others, he dived right in. After a couple of years’ worth of practice, Vadim became a skilful generalist, mainly because he already tried his hand at everything digital art had to offer back when he was still learning. Things like CAD, illustration and MEL scripting were all familiar to him. And if any of you remember our previous interviews with the artists behind Ori and the Blind Forest (2015), you’ll know that Moon Studios’ workflow is built on having everyone contributing to a variety of different things…

Greg Rutkowski on Rethinking His Approach to Art

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Greg Rutkowski has been our friend for five years now, but he’s been a friend to the online art community for much longer. This is why we’ve decided to invite him back for a catch-up interview on Vox Groovy this month. After all, many things have changed. He’s now a father to two daughters, he has a completely new outlook on art and life, and I’m assuming that we can all agree on the fact that the quality of his work has skyrocketed since our last proper sit-down with him. In light of this, we’re really excited to tell you about Greg’s shift towards a more traditional, oil-on-canvas-like style, and we think he may have voiced a popular sentiment when he spoke about how an artist can get tired of the artificial look that digital art often carries with it…