Artist- Shigenori Soejima

     An artist I’d like to discuss is Shigeori Soejima. Of course, an artist not many people are familiar with but is a huge influence to me and my work. He is an art director for most games in Atlus and his more popular work was in designing the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona games. I am biased since I am a fan of the games, but his art style is a lot to discuss as well.

 

     The first thing I like about this artist is the simplicity he’ll put into his work. This can be seen in the line art and colors. Example above helps this statement since lines are used only as necessary to define features such as strands of hair not part of larger bunches, folds in clothes, and even the little details to accessories. It is a larger portion of his art style, but in terms of an art director, simplicity is key for other supporting artists to understand their art and replicate it to keep everything consistent in a game.

     The next thing about this artist I enjoy is how he implements the game’s themes around a specific color alone. The three examples above are clearly different games, characters, etc. but the important thing is the base color theme. From his art book interviews, he explains he revolves the art around a specific color for the player to experience more than just an understanding of the main theme of the game. The blue used is to emphasize this feeling of dark fate as the theme revolved around life and death. From darker shades to compliment darker blues at night and lighter shades of blue being alone to the day to differentiate both themes, but revolving around one color. The next picture does same with a yellow/orange as it’s a bright, warm feeling in the day, but darker saturated yellows and oranges make things distorted and harder to see at first glance. The final example revolves around love and of course pink is the obvious color, but the theme revolved around a horror story of a “Nightmare on Elm Street” style (die in dreams= die in real life). So the best way to incorporate pink and love into a horror game was by making pink more of a compliment to black.