I wish I'd done This

As a person who considers concept art for movies and videogames to be good revenue for art in general I’m glad there still is a love for traditional work in a modern world so use to pop prints and digital painting. This is a cover of the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night videogame released in the latter part of the 90s. Thanks to Ayami Kojima’s concept art it also documents a time where the famous game series strayed away from the self parody of its hero fighting classic universal movie monsters and underwent a more aesthetic and sensibly romantic style.

Ayami tends to draw with a conte crayon and adds volume by adding black Indian ink, the waterproof qualities of that ink makes it perfect to add glazes of acrylic, and on trying to imitate this style a few years back I was told how remarkably fast the process was.

The clarity of Ayami’s technique shows that she is well learned and highly practiced but she has an aesthetic taste to her work, her Asian-Caucasian complexion of her figures are her own trademark as well as her idea of a perfect face. It makes me think of what makes a face beautiful and for that matter what makes a face cute or scary? This may not be the standard of illustration quality as an imaginative illustrator but more so the standard of technique, the fact that this is a cover from a Japanese game, a country so full of commercial big eyed and loud manga games gives me hope that traditional art still is admired, especially when it is called for within a stylistically dark videogame.