Artist influence: Snatti

I was first introduced to Atey Ghailan by a classmate, I had no idea who he was and what art he made, so I checked online and he had recently released an artbook full of drawings he did every single day for a year, 365 days is a difficult task, for me at least. The introduction of his book explains his process and what he did to create 365 drawings, each day for 2 hours he would sit down and create concepts based on what he had experience, he states that he wanted to learn how to produce concepts that have a sense of story boarding/telling.

I'm so surprised that he managed to do these concepts in 2 hours that I had to find his social media to then discover that he is a concept artist working at Riot Games which explains why he's so good. Working for Riot Games a big game company that don't employ many artists shows the greatness of his work.

I not only love his colour technique, his composition understanding. he adds various effects such as blurs for the background so that we focus on what he wants to be focused. here is one example that showcases what I love about his colouring:

To simply explain what I love about his colouring, it's that when he wants to focus on a part of the composition he gives that area a lot of saturation amongst the rest of the background that is always desaturated, another aspect is the lighting he uses, here's another example:

The use of red lighting in the background really pushes the characters forward closer to the foreground and really defines the character.

Here are a few examples of how he focuses on an object withing the composition (his compositions are also an aspect that plays a big part which I'd love to learn from):

As you can see from the 2 examples above, we are focused on the character closer to the foreground,  I'd love to create a concept that blurs out the background like he has done. I've noticed that he uses this at a medium shot composition.

Atey art is going to be very helpful this year to inspire my work, I hope I use what I've understood from the compositions and apply it to my own work.

artbook collab

I started this artbook project with a bunch of friends online as a way to not only promote my work but their work in the process, the purpose was to create a character and all draw the character in our own styles. We started first developing a character, discussing how the character would look like and what they would be wearing which also sparked the idea of this artbook being a seasonal theme book where we explore the world of the character throughout the seasons.

Since this project is still developing, I've decided that the team and I are not to show any of the sketches or concepts we made until we have finished the book and the only way to promote this book is to publicise it through preview posts on all our accounts, once we have an audience which is likely going to happen quickly since most of us in the team have big social presence, boosting our chances hopefully.

So far we have started on the winter seasonal book, and we have created a character that lives in japan exploring her daily teenage life, we have made some character designs to suit the theme and how we want the character to look like. Everything throughout the project is done by all of us, even if I started the project, we all worked together to create her.

To explain our process someone developed a simple base of the character with a bunch of clothes, hairstyles and accessories, then I mashed the base with the things I liked and made a mock up of what I wanted. Someone from the team then took the mock up and made a lineart of the final design which another teammate and I coloured, from this we all started to create simple sketches and concepts of the character going about her day. I hope we can finish the winter season artbook as soon as possible so we could move on to spring edition.

update 03/04/17

unfortunately, we did not manage to complete the winter 2016 artbook, but not at all lost interest in creating the artbook, we have decided to combine spring and summer into an artbook and hopefully get a lot done for it.

we are all just trying to finish our studies and hopefully, continue with this project throughout the end of spring and start of summer.