Greg Rutkowski on Rethinking His Approach to Art

I can easily say that these last five years were the most difficult and most beautiful years of my life. I have two daughters now, I’ve built a house for my family and we’ve made lots of life-changing decisions throughout this period. I’ve also rethought my entire approach to work and painting itself, but that’s a much bigger story to tell.

I started to notice how both the world and our industry have changed over time. Even our approach to the work that we do has changed now… We started to become more efficient (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but at the same time, we began to forget about the precious small details that were key.

I got to the point where I found myself missing the “organic” feeling in my workflow, so I started to download more and more traditional art for inspiration. I asked myself, “Why is this happening… am I tired of the artificial look of digital art?” And honestly, I’m still not sure, maybe something entirely different guided me towards this new style. Either way, there’s a ton of illustrations that you can see online and I always stop when I find something interesting in terms of artistic freedom. Brushstrokes that look like acrylic/oil, or maybe even exciting uses of colour that bring the old masters’ techniques to mind. This natural “organic” style started to become my goal, and my dream was to convince others to go down that path. To bring the joy of creation and to re-introduce the old masters as the main point of inspiration.

A few years ago, I had a totally different attitude when comparing work and personal paintings. Work for me was a struggle to fit into someone else’s idea/style whilst personal paintings were an experiment. Even if I was always pushing myself forward and trying new things, those two were so different. Today, it merges almost entirely and my approach is pretty much the same across the board. I’m trying apply all the thought and all the techniques to the client work. I think that we should fight for a style in the industry. It gives so much more variety!

There are too many great artists who influenced my work at some point so it would be impossible to mention all of them, but I’ll try to name the few that come to mind!
From the “old masters,” I’m hugely inspired by: Aleksander Gierymski, Jan Matejko, Jozef Chelmonski, Ilya Repin, Joaquinn Sorolla and many, many others.
From the “digital masters,” I like Tyler Jacobson, John Park, Jamie Jones, Craig Mullins, Piotr Jablonski, Eytan Zana, Michael Komarck, Sergey Kolesov, Wesley Burt, Slawomir Maniak, Wangjie Li, Yizheng Ke and many others (I could easily add two or three times more).

I appreciate them mostly because they have artworks with that “organic” factor I like. Their pieces stand out from the many others and I’m always finding lots of new things that I can learn from them.

ANNO 1800 was one of my best projects and I feel that working on it was a great honour. The freedom of the creation and style was awesome! We worked as a team together with the KARAKTER Studio Design. I was responsible for the painting part and the guys from Karakter delivered my a 3D/photobashed scene as a base. And from there I was painting in the “1800s style.”
I can honestly say that this job was a milestone for me because, for the first time ever, I could go with my style 100% on a bigger project. And hey, it ended pretty well, the client was happy and the same can be said for me.

Yes, it’s different. ANNO 1800 wasn’t just a great project when it comes to the freedom given to us by the client, it was also a project that should be as close as possible to the aesthetic of the 1800s. That’s why I could go with the natural lighting, realistic colours and values. My folder of  inspirations was filled with old paintings and old photographs. I pushed the style towards traditional painting as much as I could, just trying to keep what’s important in there. For MTG art, it’s a little bit different. We have fantasy world that doesn’t exist, we have settings that are unnatural, and we have to fit the composition into the card’s size. It’s a little bit different, although I’m always trying to get close to the “organic” feeling here as well.

It’s really hard to pick a “favourite” piece. But I think I’d pick “Revolution.” In this piece, I was really trying to follow the “old master'” approach and transfer it onto my digital canvas. I’ve learnt that a focal point shouldn’t just be detailed, or interestingly lit. A focal point is also determined by a paint’s structure/thickness, which is really hard to show in digital art. Next, I’ve learnt that I can show many objects in a more abstract way and our brain is still going to read it as an actual object. All of those aspects are ones that I’ve discovered through analysing old paintings.

It’s funny, there’s so many abstractions, whereas nowadays everything should be detailed, even the things you can’t actually see! They’re usually on the other layer so the clients could change the composition whenever they want. Like a more structured way of painting, but it’s still kind of annoying.

We have all been doing good!
I’m very thankful and proud of Szymon Biernacki and Marcin Jakubowski for their work on Klaus. They did an amazing job! But I should also mention the rest of the Polish badasses like: Maciej Kuciara (although he’s in L.A. now), Marek Okon, Slawomir Maniak, Tomasz Jedruszek, Michal Lisowski, Piotr Jablonski, Michal Dziekan, Grzegorz Przybys, Wojtek Fus, Darek Zabrocki, Michal Kus and many more. I hope no one’s gonna be mad if I forgot to mention them, you’re all great!

You know, as much as I am concerned, the atmosphere here is truly great. I’m trying to keep in touch with most of them.

My number #1 piece of advice is to follow your dreams and never give up!
Sure, it’s an obvious one but that doesn’t change that it’s one of the most important and universal sayings. It fits a person’s entire life, career, personal goals, etc., etc.

Heh, no one knows what the future will bring, but I can say that there are courses, an artbook and my very own IP. And I know a lot of you are going to want to know when, but it’s hard to tell exactly. All I know is that these are all going to happen for sure.

People are in a bit of a rush these days. We expect quick results. We learnt that the Internet brings an answer for just about any question that you might have. But try to find your goal and keep pushing forward, step-by-step. Don’t run, just walk, and from time to time, stop and sit for a while… look what you’ve managed to achieve up until this point. It’s very important that your path, whether it’s digital painting or some other goal, is full of understandings about what it is that you do and what you achieved so far.