Category Archives: Featured

Gabriel Gomez: From Watching Animated Films To Creating Them

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 15/11/2020

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

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 12/11/2020

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?

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 05/11/2020

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…

Discovering Abstract Art With Gaya Karapetyan

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 24/10/2020

Our new interview with Gaya Karapetyan is the first time Vox Groovy ever approached abstract art. This time, we’ll be moving away from the world of AAA games, art directors, and tight deadlines, and more towards a freer place where people express their feelings and experiences through wondrous combinations of flowing colour and shape. Earlier on in the year, we spoke about the art of Hilma af Klint on our radio […]

Quitting Job, Taking the Leap of Faith, Super Stressed, Not Burning to Cinder…

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 15/10/2020

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

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 30/09/2020

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!”

Quy Ho on His Humble Beginnings and Work at Riot Games

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 24/09/2020

Quy Ho’s journey to becoming a concept artist wasn’t easy. Conflicting ideas and inner voices pushed this aspiration aside for a long, long time. But despite that, once he realized that nothing else is as important and that he will eventually find himself doodling in his sketchbook anyway, he came to a decision and pursued a career in entertainment art. In the beginning, he barely knew how to draw and needed to work on a few other skills like communication and being held accountable, but concept art began to show promise in due time. The process wasn’t easy and took a lot of time, but eventually, certain clients kept coming back, the tiny commissions grew to be big projects, and the door to Riot was finally open.

Ignatius Tan and The Spirit of Miyazaki

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 01/09/2020

Ignatius Tan is an Illustration Art Lead on Legends of Runeterra at Riot Games in Hong Kong. He grew up in Singapore, and as a kid, found influences in Studio Ghibli, old-school anime, and western animations like He-Man, X-Men and the ninja turtles. The signature style of Ghibli is most noticeable when you scroll through his portfolio where artworks and sketches celebrating Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away catch your attention almost immediately. It’s fun to see how the spirit of Miyazaki’s animated films lives on, shining through in the art of a whole generation of illustrators like the one we’ve interviewed here.

The Art of Natalie Kayurova

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 25/08/2020

Natalie Kayurova is a twenty-seven-year-old artist from Kamchatka–a 1,250-kilometre-long peninsula in the Russian Far East, also known as an “artist from the far corners of the Earth.” Here, she grew up among brown bears, breathtaking nature, and fiery volcanoes. While studying painting, she worked with traditional materials like oils, pastels, and sketching pencils. The games industry came into Natalie’s life right alongside computer graphics, which is when her existing approach met with CG, making something completely new. She’s got seven years’ worth of experience…

Tomislav Jagnjic and His World of Mysterious Giants

Featured, MoreBy Groovy 20/08/2020

Tomislav Jagnjic is a Serbian Concept Artist and Illustrator whose personal project already impressed thousands of people online this year. The world of mysterious giants that he’s built found its inception when he decided that the environment art we see on ArtStation simply isn’t enough. It needed to be more engaging than just a lone figure with an imaginary landscape to explore, so he chose to throw a handful of charming storytelling elements into the mix. His artworks go along with funny and lighthearted titles, which makes for a pretty fun experience when you first see a piece by him. But when did Tomislav discover his passion for art? When we asked, he told…