Artist for top games gives 3 tips for landing illustration gigs

Ana Fedina has made art for games, and most recently, Critical Role's "The Armory of Heroes." Fedina said she made around 120 pieces of art for the 216-page book. Fedina also gave Business Insider her top tips for landing a dream illustration gig. The name Ana Fedina may not ring a bell, but if you've played games like "Diablo IV," you've seen her work. For more than seven years, Fedina has been working as a professional artist and has contributed illustrations to games like "Raid: Shadow Legends" as well. Most recently, she was the illustrator for "The Armory of Heroes," a full-art compendium of weapons and character art released by the gaming and media company Critical Role in July. Fedina didn't start out as a game artist. "I didn't know that you could make a living doing what I do now. These cool comic artists seemed pretty unreachable when I was younger, so I thought I would study design and become a graphic designer," Fedina told Business Insider. But in college, she discovered that drawing for games was a viable career and went all in on making concept art. It started on Tumblr Fedina, who worked on "The Armory of Heroes" alongside writer Martin Cahill , was a fan of Critical Role before landing the book gig. "Back in the day, I spent too much time on Tumblr and one day I started to see some interesting-looking characters on my feed," Fedina said. Those characters were from the crew's second Twitch-streamed "Dungeons & Dragons" campaign , which has now been written into an Amazon-backed animated series on Prime Video. "I wanted to work with Critical Role for a while, and I may have had some opportunities in the past, but they didn't work out," Fedina said. "So it was pretty cool to try something, but I didn't expect this project to end up being this big." Years later, an editor working with CR's publishing arm contacted her and asked to contribute to the book. That kicked off a yearlong gig that began in January 2024, in which Fedina illustrated around 120 pieces for the book, which spans 216 full-color pages. Intricate details Fedina's illustration process for "The Armory of Heroes" involved everything from research to drafting, then getting several rounds of notes from the Critical Role co-founders. "There were some notes, like, 'The character wielding this sharp weapon might hurt themselves.' Or, 'let's make it more functional,' or, 'Let's make changes to suit the armor and weapons to the wearer, make it more personal,'" she said. She said she also relied on notes she'd taken from the Twitch stream . Fedina also said that she included some personal touches in the character art. The cleric Pike Trickfoot was one of her favorites to draw, and Fedina produced her own version of the character's armor. Top tips for creatives Fedina's top tip for artists who want to secure a role with companies like Critical Role is to branch out and create...

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