Hi everyone! I’m Lawrence, an illustrator/cartoonist from Brooklyn, New York. It’s nice to be invited to this forum. Originally I wanted to be a fine artist when I was in university, but fell in love with entertainment arts as time went by. I love academic figure drawing and was introduced to video game concept art by a friend one day in life drawing class. He looked over my sketchbook and noticed that I had a stylistic tendency to be dramatic and playful in my figures. Ever since then, I gravitated more and more in that direction. For this piece that I chose to showcase, it is an example of my creature design work. In the past, I worked at a small indie video game company based in New York, so a lot of my thought processes involve finding a design based on story briefs and some minor art direction. In the world of concept art, finality is not necessarily critical to a project at large as much as a finished illustration for a publication or book would be. The final result can and often does look like it’s still a work in progress. And this is because concept art is about the ideas, and the potential iterations of those ideas. There is an emphasis on function over form, and while this is important, in a gamers mind, they just want to play a character/creature and feel like the art is a reflection of something relatable and familiar. We all just want to have fun. Having said this, this piece I’m showing is quite the opposite. I’ve always been somewhat drawn to monsters for some reason. The macabre and horrific tend to interest me, because drawing them is again super fun. I feel like it gives me the most amount of creative freedom because it’s a practice in mindful exploration of shape, form, and silhouette through the drawing of skin, flesh, and anatomy. And although I am quite the unpredictable contradiction in that I love to draw beauty, beauty cannot exist without the ugly. They both need to harmoniously exist side by side as is the law of the universe. There is a lot of mystery in creatures and monsters, an unexplained intrigue into the unknown that makes it curious and frightening all at once.
Website: www.lawrenceleungart.carbonmade.com
Instagram 1: www.instagram.com/drawjitsu
Instagram 2: https://www.instagram.com/eknerwal
