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

Magazine Article reviews

Article Title - Inspiration workshop : The Genesis of Scary Girl
Featured magazine - Computer Arts
Artist - Nathan Jurevicius

Ink + Acrylic - created for a show at the Magic Pony, Toronto

Scary Girl is a cult graphic novel created by Nathan Jurevicius about the adventures and troubles of a small scary girl and her companion Toycat. Nathan first created this character for a magazine article and he then worked into this character to make her the led in his graphic novel. This initial concept of scary girl was then revamped when Jurevicius was offered to create a set of collectible vinyl figures based on the Scary Girl concept. This made him adapt the style of the character to both fit a graphical representation and a 3 dimensional representation. Jurevicius quotes ;

" for the 1st time, i introduced obvious flaws into my characters"

Scary Girl Vinyl Collectables

Jurevicius started to make his characters unique, having their own personal style and iconography to identify them by, which make the characters more memorable with his audience. he changed her arms to a tentacle and a bone stump and gave her a roughly sewn, pirate style coat which was linked with an eye patch. He also changed Scary Girls companion into a discarded tin robot / wind up toy. These changes to the characters all added to the story of his novel and linked with the themes and style of his work but also helped him create something fit for the purposes of his clients. As well as Scary Girl and Toycat, Jureviciushad also created four other main characters that are integrated into the Scary Girl universe, each having their own unique       character style and flaws to make them iconic and individual from the main character.

collection of Scary Girl imagry

The use of colours in the Scary Girl universe are used very specifically to emphasize that (quote) "things are rarely how they appear". Jurevicius does this by using exotic, bright and intense colours to create plants and animals of beautify as an aversion from the hidden danger within them (e.g. the most beautiful of plants being poisonous).