For the past few years my favourite concept artist has been Kekai Kotaki, a Hawaiian artist whos career started at the age of 21 working as an environment concept artist for Guild Wars. From then he went sky-rocketing through the ranks of the concept art branch unitl becoming lead artist after just 8 years before leaving ArenaNet to move on to other things. Kekai's art ranges from warriors and dragons to enormous sea monsters and vast landscapes. Although his characters are almost ever changing what doesnt seem to vary is his style when he makes these pieces.
From studying his work I've learnt that Kekai builds his art on top of textures, moulding the artistic creation onto the texture and refining it until complete. The style itself appears loosely painted yet at the same time at first glances looks incredibly detailed. An example of this is armour, Kekai's style allows the eye to pick out each brush stroke and identify it as a stand alone shape while at the same time using near perfect rendering techniques to refine even the smallest shink in a soldiers chainmail vest.
Below I have chosen just a few of my favourite pictures that Kekai has created, all 3 are from his time as a Guild Wars concept artist. These 3 in perticular are from "Guild Wars 2".
The first picture I have chosen is the first Dragon boss your GW2 character faces in battle, the reason why I love this piece in perticular is mainly down to my love of dragons and the mythology behind them, the other reason why this piece catches my eye is the colours that Kekai uses in this portrayal. The purple and pink lightening shooting out of the earth really catches my eye and seems to make the focus (the dragons claw and arm) stand out more and almost appear three dimentional as well as giving the dragon more depth and ferocity as a whole.
The second picture I chose, also from GW2 shows a Charr engineer, one of the playable classes in the game. I love this picture because the armour that the Charr wears around its arms and the mask on his face really stands out to me as I find that both creatures and humans that wear masks are more aluring and interesting than those without. Another reason this piece catches my eye is the cannon that the engineer is holding, I adore the textures and colours used on it and the way it has been composed with the rest of the picture really makes my imagine clearly how it would feel to touch it and how heavy it would be to try and hold it.
My final picture that I have chosen shows an army of Charr preparing for battle, I chose this because I really appreciate and admire the detail that has gone into creating each one in the scene. I also love the colours used in the making of the main characters flaming sword. The rendering of this picture is beautiful and I would like to learn from it as it shows the subtle glow from the sword to the Charrs face as he is holding it up.
In the future I will try and get in contact with Kekai to try and understand his style of art more and what has inspired him to refine his style the way he has, I will also continue to follow his various blogs to keep an eye out for when he travels to do various workshops around the globe as I would love to attend one to learn all I can.
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