Kekai Kotaki

Kekai Kotaki Research

Hello guys,

Kekai Kotaki has been one of my favourite artists since I started playing this specific MMORPG game called "Guild Wars 2".  I found his artwork because his concepts were always shown during the loading screen in game.  Moreover, I look up to this artist's concepts and work because of it's details and painting style and I adore him since he started from scratch and now he works with big companies like Arenanet and Bungie.

Image Link

In guild wars there are 5 races which are; Asura which are the small creatures wearing blue glasses, human, Norn (Basically humans but more huge and Viking like), Sylvari (plant humans) and Charr (Bull like creatures).  The player can choose one of the races then can go on and choose a class such as: Warrior, thief, mage....etc. then he or she can jump into the game and play the character they created.  Most MMORPGs are played like that but the difference since usually the gameplay, races and classes which I will talk about in a different blog.  The picture above shows all the races in Guild Wars 2 in different classes.

To start with, the most thing I adore in Kekai's artwork is how he paints his concepts in details yet he manages to give it a sketchy feel into it.  I chose these 2 specific concepts since they were one of the most appealing creature art concepts in his work for Guild Wars 2.  Although my project will not include background artwork for my creatures, I appreciate the quality kekai puts in his concepts since he does not draw on top of photos like other concept artists.

I can relate to these pieces since I am aiming to paint using a similar painting style to Kekai although it will not look the same because of the experience gap between me and him. 

These are another concepts that he did for the game.  I can benefit from these concepts and the ones above that too since my painting style is going to be inspired by Kekai's painting style since I love the sketchy yet detailed concept of his artwork and the colour usage of them.

Having plants as inspiration is useful too since I am aiming to create creatures out of plants so the first picture of the monster plant is useful for myself.  Another useful thing to look on to is concept art sketches like the second picture since it shows more than one idea in one page which is beneficial for developing a piece of artwork.  

The first picture shows more concepts done by Kekai and the one on the right is my favourite because I like how his body is hollow from the inside and fire is flowing inside of it.  The other picture is not a creature but an armour concept which made it into the game.  I added this armour concept into my research because it can be useful for me if I want to create armour for one of my creatures.

What I like about his artwork as well is his usage vast variety of colour hues in one concept art piece by making the colours saturated.  Making them saturated makes it aesthetically pleasing to the eyes although there are a lot of colours in the piece.

All of the artwork was taken from this site click here

Kekai Kotaki. 2017. Guild Wars 2 - Kekai Kotaki. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.kekaiart.com/guild-wars-2.html. [Accessed 08 May 2017].

Kekai Kotaki. 2017. About Me - Kekai Kotaki. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.kekaiart.com/about-me.html. [Accessed 08 May 2017].

Thinking about the my work

 I have looked at further research about red pandas and cats that I will show later in the blog. For my piece that is inspired by Kekai's artwork, I created a unique creature from a mixture between these 2 animals.  Please find the sketch of it below! 

As you can see here, I have managed to create a creature by merging a cat and a red panda together while adding my own tweaks into it to make it look more interesting and vicious.  I added a human scale on the right to show you the difference in size between the player's character and the creature. The creature is huge and wild.

I have faced anatomy difficulties throughout this piece but unfortunate I don't have anything to show since I erased the errors and forgot to take a picture of them.  I found drawing the body of the creature difficult at first since I did not have proper reference to it.  I think painting this creature will be more difficult since I never painted using Photoshop my whole life especially with Kekai's painting style.