Paint a video game hero

Sandra Duchiewicz of Creative Assembly crafts a dynamic piece of artwork for upcoming fantasy strategy game Total War: Warhammer

This workshop will show the process I and my colleagues at Creative Assembly use to create dynamic and thrilling fantasy illustrations, while staying true to an established intellectual property.

When working with such a renowned universe, such as the Total War series, you have to be mindful of how characters, creatures, items and locations should be portrayed. Exercise your creativity while staying true to the spirit of the original. And that’s in addition to the classic artistic struggles of composition, sense of movement, anatomy, values, colour and polish. Fortunately, we have a wealth of source material to draw upon, and some incredibly well-defined miniatures and concept art to work with. At Creative Assembly we’re doing our best to bring this fantasy world to life, and the bedrock of this process is research. Understanding the lore and embracing the source material is one of the most important things we do.

I hope that this artwork demonstrates our love for our job, and displays not only the special care we take to depict Warhammer’s fantasy-themed content, but also what a rich palette it gives us to work with. Having such a deep well to draw upon really gives you a lot of diverse options and directions to go in.

This composition has also been created with a destination in mind – that it will appear on the cover of ImagineFX – and as such it has to work with an extra level of editorial requirements. This naturally brings another layer of depth and intrigue to the task. This workshop showcases the approach I take and how the piece reaches its final destination.