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…

Johannes Figlhuber: 10 Years With Airborn Studios

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Five years ago, we spoke with Johannes Figlhuber about his work on Ori and the Blind Forest (2015). Now he’s back on Vox Groovy to catch up with us and tell us more about the decade he’s spent working at Airborn Studios in Berlin. When asked about the company, he said that they specialise in outsourcing, doing things like visual development, concept design, marketing art, etc. Their focus is on stylised art, and their portfolio certainly shows it with several artworks for successful games like Fortnite (2017), Spyro Reignited Trilogy (2018), Valorant (2020), and many others […]

Gabriel Gomez: From Watching Animated Films To Creating Them

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Gabriel Gomez grew up during the so-called “Disney Renaissance,” with films like Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Tarzan as his first major influences. He would later discover Japanese anime, which meant seeing Hayao Miyazaki’s unparalleled artistry for the first time in his life. In this industry, watching a Studio Ghibli film is almost like a rite of passage. It is the ultimate goal, and it does an extraordinary job of inspiring the artists we like to write about. In our interview with him, Gabriel told us that…

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…

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!”

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…

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…

Anton Fadeev on Bold Colour Palettes and Stupendous Environments

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This isn’t the first Vox Groovy interview to feature someone who has worked on Duelyst (2016), but Anton Fadeev is the artist who made the game’s art style pop. His bold colour palette and stupendous environments have been around since the start of its Kickstarter campaign on March 9, 2014. Of course, those of you who continue to follow the game’s development know that the majority of its marketing art was made by him too. We spoke to Anton recently, and we were able to learn more about how he got his first credit (Duelyst) through Keith Lee—an ex-Blizzard developer who showed Anton that his artwork might be worth more than initially thought.