Magazine Article Review

Article Title - Rising Stars
Featured Magazine - ImagineFX
Artist - Luke Manacini

Alice - won a challenge onCGhub.com

Luke Manacini is a young American artist, working for blizzard gaming company ( creating games like world of warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo) as a concept artist on the Starcraft 2 project. Luke specializes in fantasy art and excels in his area due to his obsession with the blizzard games. he was hired to the blizzard team after applying his work in for the fan art section of the blizzard community and because of his versatility and ability to adapt his skills to produce different and interesting imagery.

Before joining the blizzard team Luke obtained illustrating jobs through his parents, including work form publishers McGraw Hill and Oxford University Press. He also worked for Privateer Press games studio and he quotes " working for Privateer was invaluable for pushing myself to develop a professional style - something i wouldnt have accomplished so soon by producing personal work".

Rustborne Aquilae - inspired by the work of Frazetta and Brom

Lukes love for his work inspires him to create more imaginative and creative imagery and he constantly strives to gain more artistic and stylistic knowledge to enhance his work.

"if you soak up as much art as you can, you can see what works and what doesn't"

he seeks inspiration from all areas and applies these to his work to find the best composition ,pose and style for the imagery he is producing at the time and this thorough research of all different art style is what makes him so flexible and adaptable to work in different styles.
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Here are the processes that Luke works through when producing high quality imagery ;

1 - he creates thumbnails for the imagery to help figure out the pose and composition of the piece.

2 - he lays down the first colours (in a dark colour scale) to work out roughly where the lighting is hitting the scene and to save repainting the shadow areas of the image.

3 - he focuses on rendering the character, tightening up the details and building up the colours (withought including any secondary or coloured lighting)

4 - he then adds a rough background to the image and begins to flesh it out and adds the last lighting touches

5 - he then finishes the image by including all the effect and rim lighting which pulls the finished image together.
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Luke's imagery is very exciting and has stunning composition to the scenes that the characters are displayed in, also his use of perspectives, lighting and poses brings the imagery to life and really helps convey the scenery and the actions of the characters.

Starcraft - painting of Legions of Zerg