You’d better limber up because this roundup is going to be a bit of a stretch. First off, one of the artists I’ve got here doesn’t necessarily work on games nor is his work actually concept art. Secondly, another artist primarily works on 3D art pieces, so he’s not actually in the eponymous arena either. It kind of makes me want to rename this feature, but we’ve made it this far so let’s keep going! When we make mistakes, it’s a lot easier to ignore it and just plow ahead, right?
Or something like that.
Anyways, let’s start off with Josh Herman. He currently works as a character artist at Marvel. If you check out his IMDB page, you can see he’s done a lot of damage in Hollywood for such a young fellow. Herman here has worked on Iron Man 3, Total Recall, Real Steel, and a whole bunch of other Marvel movies, mostly as a digital sculptor. He’s also done art for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and pre-production work on the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy.
He also tweets in rather sporadic but rapid clumps and just started a blog about learning to draw.
Next up is Joshua Brian Smith, a bona fide concept artist at Riot Games. Riot, if you weren’t aware, develops the incredibly popular League of Legends game, the MOBA that people can’t stop playing. He graduated pretty much a year ago from the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and made the seven-mile drive up to Santa Monica soon after to work with Riot.
While his work there at the studio is impressive, some of his school stuff is also quite good, though also quite different. League of Legends has pretty much locked him in a fantasy world, but I would love to see him branch out. It’s very obvious he has a wide range of influences and passions that would benefit from his grand-scale vision and raw take on lighting scenes.
Tohan Kim works at Crytek’s Austin studio in Texas, though if you’re familiar with the fallout of the THQ bankruptcy, you’ll know that this used to be Vigil Games. Vigil was the studio behind the Darksiders series, a critically well-received but commercially disappointing franchise of games about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse dealing with said worldwide annihilation, and were in the process of making Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium.
Dark Millennium, however, is still under wraps seeing as how its future is mostly undecided after the THQ dismantling, but Kim’s Darksiders work is all the way out there, as are some Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning pieces. Jeez, I can’t believe how long Mythic Entertainment has been making MMOs.
Lastly we have some concept art from Herman Ng for Rift: Storm Legion. Storm Legion is an expansion from late last year for Rift, an MMO from Trion Worlds. If you’re wondering where else you may have heard that name, it’s probably from the inescapable advertising of the Defiance tie-in MMO also being developed by Trion.
Ng, though, has a bunch of cool art up from Storm Legion. He’s really good at giving his drawings a sense of life to where it looks like he actually captured these creatures and people in the middle of some action.
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