MK is a junior who’s double majoring in Creative Writing (Fiction) and Art (3D Animation). Past projects of theirs include a wall mural, window paintings, shirt design, and peer portraits.
MK has been drawing seriously going on for about 11 years now and hopes to continue learn more by both/either studio internships and graduate school. They mostly work digitally, their primary program being Adobe Photoshop but are also learning Maya, Adobe Illustrator, ZBrush, and Adobe Animate.
The Trio:
A concept essay like this is kind of strange for an artist like me; I’m less of a fine arts artist, think art that could end up in museum or has many meanings behind it, and more of what I like to call a ‘practical’ artist, so someone who puts art into a practice of sorts or puts the art towards a bigger project in a sense. So, a lot of my work is more sketching or just nice illustrations without much else behind it, and that logic can be put forward to this piece. ‘The Trio’ as I’ve dubbed it is just a nice illustration of characters from a game series I enjoy, plain and simple.
The building of this piece came from the idea of wanting a poster of all three characters together, but I’m a college student so can’t just be spending money on posters willy nilly. So, I decided to use the spare time when I should be studying to make this for my room. I can’t say I went in with a concrete plan, because I never do, instead I started browsing the internet for interesting poses and various poster inspiration. Since there were three characters, I wanted a triangular shape where they were on the page, so it would be balanced.
Without much luck finding a specific reference, I made my own with a few poses I had saved that I liked. I liked the idea of them in more of a lounging state despite being in a more desolate place since that would match the vibe of the game. I also wanted each pose to match the character: the front character in red, Dante, is more of confident, arrogant kind of character so I had him with a more wide-legged stance and cocky head tilt; the top left with the robot arm, Nero, is a tad more serious than Dante but is a tired roughly college aged kid just trying to get by so I wanted him a bit more up right but still looks like he could easily walk out of there at any
moment; lastly, the character in blue in the top right, Vergil, is a tense, ever-calculating character who is in a constant state of judgement so he got the stern look whilst holding his head, basically wanted him to give off the vibe of someone asking ‘is this really necessary?’
Hopefully that kind of explains the crazy way my brain decides to work when it comes to building the concept behind my work. A lot of my reasoning doesn’t come from logistics, or something taught in an art class. It’s more about what feels right; the other stuff can always come later since art is a living thing.
The Tributary 