Sergi Brosa’s Post Apocalyptic Adventure
Catalan Sergi Brosas’ biker gang illustrations brings you into a playful, punky world after a possible apocalypse. The characters are a part of an upcoming title from Canadian studio Kemojo. As the project still is at an early stage of development, we can only enjoy parts of the artwork so far, imagining the story growing.
– These are children of the wasteland. At this stage, we are producing my own concepts. So I’m allowed to choose what I want to do with each character. They are choosing if they want more girls or more boys or when we change clan of people. I’m just starting with a new clan, kind of different from the Biker Crew.
Living and working as a freelance artist in Barcelona, game concepts was not an obvious choice of career.
– I ended my studies some years ago not feeling professional enough to start working for the industry. I guess that happens to many students. So at that time, I was working as a freelance artist. I started doing commissions on DeviantArt while I could do freelance work for some companies. The one that offered me a permanent job at that stage was a toy company. I was working on a variety of things; tiny toys, advertisement stuff, cards… Meanwhile I was trying to finish off comic projects for a French company, a project that failed. So, I decided to focus on other areas, like video games. I believed video games wouldn’t get me stuck on the same topic, so I would fall into a routine. Video games is also one of the faster growing industries where art have an important place.
How are you proceeding with the material and turning them into 3D characters? How much of your artistic expression gets lost in the transition?
– As we are at an early stage of development, I can’t really say. But I guess we will lose some expression. For example, in the visuals I am using a strong cell shading style, mixed with dark lines. This gives the characters an attitude that 3D rendered colors will lose. And this is why I love cell shading because I can express this fluent.. this flowing look to the final piece. This final expression could also be achieved with fast and messy brush strokes. Thing that 3D can’t offer at all. I am talking in general 3D terms, not this game in particular. I’m sure that in the next years there could appear some 3D software that would generate this hand made look. I know there is a cell shade look for 3D, like in video games like Dragon Ball. But they still need to be more fluid in the forms.
Do you see any trends in character art right now looking at game studios around the world?
-I am not sure. If we take a look at the final visual style (color, lines), I think this kind of style is being used for old school role playing video games, and old school fight games. I’m not really seeing too much of this style in modern video game art. Usually everything is looking more painty, in games I like to play, looking very realistic.
-About the topic of the game, this postapocalyptic stuff is hitting big. Many movies have been made on that topic aswell as video games. The game Rage was the trigger that pushed me to produce postapo stuff. I always loved sci-fi, but postapocalyptic is for me on a different level. I love how everything is wasted and I love the freedom of doing what I want to do without social acceptance. Many of the things I have in my head..it’s accepted in this crazy no laws world.
If I let you predict the future of game production 20 years from now, what would it look like? What would you want it to look like?
-Haha, good question. I imagine an ungravity room where you can wear 3d view glasses and have your whole body covered by a some kind of armour to be able to move your it to control characters. Run, Jump, etc. If we travel to a more futurist moment in time, directly connecting video games to your brain to feel everything, to make it as real as reality. But watch out for viruses.
