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2DARTIST MAGAZINE | Bright and bold game concepts
was definitely Ori and the Blind Forest. I worked
on it for almost four years so naturally I evolved
a lot as an artist during that project. I became
very good at visual problem-solving after a while,
simply because it was a massive project with
intensely complex visual problems to solve. We
created a whole world and back story for almost
everything. I still feed on those times for inspiration.
There were other very fun projects; in particular
I remember the pitch for Linker Saga that I
created together with my friend and art director
Peter Söderbaum for the entertainment
company King. All those bright colors and
cute planets were just a joy to work on.
2da: What initial steps do you take when you
are first given a brief for a new project?
MD: A good and very important question! Before
I draw even a single line I try to talk with the client
for as long as I can and get as much information
out of them as possible. It is important to find
out what you are meant to do first. It can be
deceiving to feel time pressure and start sketching
right away, and I have definitely done that a
lot in the past, but it usually just leads to a bad
final product. These days I sit down for at least a
couple of hours and find reference photographs
for inspiration. It just helps the creative juices flow.
That doesn’t mean you should copy what you see
in a photo, but rather interpret it in your own way.
I also recommend sticking with line drawing for
the first draft that you show the client. It saves you
a lot of trouble and tears if you have to change
something or the client isn’t happy. Once the
client approves the line drawing it depends if they
want to see a grayscale sketch or if they trust you
enough to skip this part. I personally don’t like to
do grayscale at all as it feels a bit like wasted time.
Underneath the line drawing I really love the
method of filling in the basic colors of every
individual object in the drawing. Once that is done
I usually go ahead with a Multiply layer of 70%
black and define the shadows and light direction.
In the steps that follow I keep adding shadow
layers to define the darkest bits of the painting.
Then on top I like to use either Normal or Linear
Dodge layers to paint in some direct lighting,
spectacular lighting, reflective lights, and so on.
Once I feel like the painting is 80% done I keep
adding Normal layers and just paint on top of
everything and finish the painting. In the very end
This image was painted after a very inspiring trip
to China and you can see some influences in thereIllustration practice from
2015 to practice storytelling