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PAINT A POWERFUL CONCEPT

PEINTO Digital Art Magazine

Concept Artist Ana Ramírez Talks Homegrown Touch in Pixar’s ‘Coco’

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Letter From Shuihan Ding

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News Food

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COVER STORY Native Art: Concept artist Ana Ramirez talks the homegrown touch in Pixar’s ‘Coco’

2ND STORY Games on!: An exclusive look at the ceration of NieR:Automata’s beautiful comcept art

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IN THIS ISSUE....

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EDITOR IN CHIEF SHUIHAN DING

EXEECUTIVE EDITOR SHUIHAN DING

PAINT A POWERFUL CONCEPT

WWW.PEINTO.COM

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MANAGING EDITOR RANDY DUNBAR

DIGITAL DESIGNER SHUIHAN DING

ILLUSTRATORS SHUIHAN DING ANA RAMIREZ KAZUMA KODA

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS KAZUMA KODA JENNIFER WOLFE

EDITOR

LETTER FROM THE

PEINTO is a conceptural art and digital painting magazine that established in 2018, the name is based on Jpanesse word â&#x20AC;&#x153;paintâ&#x20AC;?. Each issue is a compilation of illustrations, game arts and animation cencerted around a single theme. Our primary goal of the magazine is to give exposure of how artists create the concepts of character and environment behind the famous games and animes, and celebrate the work of artists making a big impact on their respective fields.

Shuihan Ding Editor of PEINTO

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se LOOKING BACK OVER THE ANIME-INFLUENCED ART CAREER OF DJ/PRODUCER MURLO Murlo is well known for bringing his live audio-visual sets to clubs and art centres around the UK, but this September will see the Manchester musician’s debut art show – sponsored by Red Bull – giving a nice retrospective of his respected forays into video art and illustration. Split into sections, the exhibition will comprise a visual timeline of his work covering record covers, event flyers and beyond, along with a station to watch selected animated pieces and music videos. There’ll also be live drawing with Murlo himself,

along with a new series of works entitled Biolife, as previewed here. If you’re in/near to London, you can catch The Murlo Collection at Studio 9294 from September 6 to the 9th. The show will also marks the very first opportunity to buy limited edition Murlo prints, so best head down early if you’re looking for collectables. If not, you can see more his visual work alongside his music at murlo.tv.

ILLUSTRATORS AND ARTISTS DEBUT NEW WORK BASED ON SOME CLASSIC GIANTS OF CULT TV Good news for the collectors out there - online shop cum screenprinting studio Print Club London is hosting its seventh annual Blisters show, with this year’s theme being cult TV. The event is a chance to grab some very limited prints, and a nice opportunity to see some great new work from great illustrators like Cassandra Yap and Oli Fowler. While last year’s theme saw some

News. food.

brilliant artworks based on classic books, this new edition of Blisters smartly takes inspiration from the current binge-heavy era of TV streaming, with original works based on the likes of Stranger Things and Twin Peaks. It isn’t all American peak TV worship, though, as the Blisters show also sees artistic tributes to ‘90s Channel 4 faves like The Big Breakfast and Father Ted, as shown below in these respective pieces by Gavin Dobson and Nina Cosford. Anyone looking for a copy to hang on their own walls can head down to the Blisters event on October 5th, as taking place in London at MC Motors.

FREE FONT MADE OUT OF CORPORATE LOGOS Brand New Roman is the brainchild of American marketing agency Hello Velocity, a free coloured font that assigns one famous logo to each letter of the alphabet e.g. A is for Amazon, B is for Beats

Electronics etc. 76 brands in total are incorporated into the typeface, so best download now before the entire project gets a phonecall from the lawyers. You can try out the font for yourself on the website to check whether it’s worth a download, or cast your eyes on these various fun creations made by other artists using the font. It’s probably worth noting that you can’t use Brand New Roman for your own commercial projects without carrying out a little copyright infringement of your own, so probably best use it for parody or reference purposes. Chrome and Firefox users may also be interested to know they can download a plugin that turns all website text into Brand New Roman. That’ll truly stick it to the man, man!

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SHAKE SHACK ARRIVES IN

DOWNTOWN LA HISTORIC CORE BY BRIGHAM YEN

hake Shack has become one of the most popular burger chains in America (and it’s even expanded internationally to an impressive eleven countries spanning from Asia to Europe with a particularly heavy presence in the Middle East). And now, the long-awaited “burger shack” that started in New York City’s Madison Square Park a decade and a half ago has finally opened its doors here in

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the middle of an exciting real estate boom in LA’s reviving urban center. It’s been over two years since DTLA Rising first broke the news that Shake Shack was coming to Downtown LA’s Historic Core, taking over the Vault nightclub at the southwest corner of 8th and Hill. Since then, downtowners have waited eagerly for Shake Shack to open up. But even more exciting than the mouthwatering menu Shake Shack is

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known for (like their juicy burgers, hot dogs, and creamy milkshakes) is the crowds (i.e., pedestrians) the restaurant will draw to a once desolate block devoid of any city life. The 3,000 square foot eatery became an instant hit this past weekend and activated the surrounding blocks with more pedestrians walking around than I had ever seen before (outside of an event, of course). The opening of Shake Shack shows how incredibly important it is for great businesses (both chains and independents) to both generate pedestrian

activity and simultaneously create the “active city life” that makes urban living so exhilarating. Soon, Shake Shack will be joined by two other great eateries in the same building — Paris Baguette and Sweetgreen — that will synergistically work together to help “glue” the Historic Core with both the Financial District and South Park. Creating these stronger pedestrian connections are necessary in order to realize our dream of building a more walkable Downtown Los Angeles. In addition, according to Rob Galanti, Senior VP of Retail Leasing for L&R Group, the building’s landlord, another fast casual eatery from Maui called Coconut’s Fish Cafe will be opening a new 3,000 square foot restaurant by this summer directly next door to Shake Shack in an adjacent parking structure also owned by L&R Group.

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equipment

SURFACE LAPTOP

Surface Laptop is thin, light, and powerful, with luxurious touches and a perfect balance of performance, portability, and battery life to see you through long days on campus in style. Complements style with an Alcantara fabric-covered keyboard, PixelSense display, & fast charging.

WACOM PRO PTH660 MEDIUM

For artists and designers who want to work completely digital from start to finish, Wacom Intuos Pro lets you illustrate, edit or design with more natural creative control than ever before.

A SKETCHBOOK

Frequently use your ideas to fill out the blank spaces as your creative process.

SONY A7II

The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first1 full-frame camera with 5-axis image stabilization and provides camera shake compensation for wide-ranging mountable lenses.

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NINTENDO SWITCH

Freedom to have fun, wherever, whenever.

ART BOOK

An artist’s book is a medium of artistic expression that uses the form or function of “book” as inspiration. Every artists have their favorite artbook of a movie or a game, where your part of inspiration come from.

PANTONE COLOR SWATCH

The most versatile tool for graphic and digital designers, Color Bridge Set provides a sideby-side visual comparison of Pantone spot colors versus their closest CMYK process printing match on coated and uncoated paper.

COPIC SKETCH MARKERS 12 COLORS

Packaged in a clear plastic case, a sketch set is the ideal way to begin or add to a marker collection. Copic markers are available in 358 permanent, non-toxic, alcohol-based ink colors and are refillable using standard color ink refills. The refill inks can be mixed to create custom colors, and empty markers are sold for this purpose.

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Native Art

Concept Artist Ana Ramírez Talks the Homegrown Touch in Pixar’s ‘Coco’ Animators have the privilege and ability to mold the characters, storyline and therefore, legacy that films impress upon our culture. Interestingly, we hardly know their names, influences or personal stories.I got a chance to interview Pixar animator, Ana Ramirez, one of the animators for the delightful new film, COCO to find our more about what motivates her as an artist.

By Jennifer Wolfe

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NATIVE ART

ixar concept artist and CalArts alum Ana Ramírez recently detailed her contributions to creating the lively, colorful world of Coco at this year’s Ottawa International Animation Festival, speaking to a packed and very enthusiastic house. (Check out her graduate film, So Long, Yupi, on

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Vimeo.) Ramírez described the research into her native Mexican heritage conducted by the filmmaking team, and later sat down with AWN to discuss her approach to her work, her designs for one of the film’s central characters, Mama Coco, and her newly-discovered love of hand-drawn type.

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I kind of stopped thinking about it as “Oh, a typeface.” It was more like, “have fun!”

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Talk a little bit about the backgrounds. During your talk, you mentioned that working with graphic design was very new to you, especially different typefaces, letter forms. What kind of research did you do to create those visuals?

At Pixar we have a library with a lot of fonts, which is really nice. All the fonts that we have in that library are fonts that we have bought or that we’re okay to use. I was trying to only search within that library because I didn’t want to find a font that I liked and then realize that we didn’t have it. Although I think it’s fine if maybe they can try to figure it out and see if we can use it. I ended up just doing everything completed, inspired by

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the fonts I found on the computer. The production designer really wanted to have it have that kind of handmade feeling, you know, of the Mexican street signage that you typically see, with a lot of rich texture and color.... So that’s why I decided to just do everything by hand.

So you did hand-drawn versions of all the typefaces? Yes. It was really fun because I just saw it as painting, just like a design. I kind of stopped thinking about it as “Oh, a typeface.” It was more like, “have fun!” It was cool to go back and look at some poster art that I really liked and see how artists mixed graphics with art, and then started seeing it differently and not so kind of square. What part of Mexico are you from?

I’m from Guanajuato, but my sister lives in Mexico City. During the time that I was working on the film I kept going back home to visit, and every time I went I would take pictures to use as references. What is your approach to creating artwork for backgrounds? I was very new at doing set design because the way that I approached it in school was more artistic. I didn’t really think about size, scale, all of that stuff. That was challenging, learning the process of working with scale and keeping in mind always “How big are the characters? How does this fit in the world?” So that was definitely a learning experience, but it was really nice because the art director for sets was always very approachable and was always happy to answer my questions, and teach me what he knew. Everyone was just so nice. At Pixar, I feel like everyone’s always so happy to share their knowledge, so that was great. Working on this film, I learned so much from other people. But it was really cool, I wanted to really portray Mexico and have all the stands with corn, and gorditas, and taco stands, and all that stuff...I really wanted to help it look authentic.

Describe a typical packet. When we packet something, we create technical drawings of selected pieces of concept art so that the technical teams know what to do with it. That helps inform everything they’re going to be working on. We’ll take the approved design and do a more technical drawing of it, along with lots of notes, and then send it over to them to work off of.

to think about how we wanted to do that. We tried a lot of different designs, like a shirt with a skirt.... We had a version where the dress wasn’t showing and she just had a Mexican rebozo on over her top. We showed the two variations, with and without showing the dress and Lee, the director, liked the one where it showed the dress. That dress is very typical in Mexico.

When you’re creating a series of drawings for approval, typically how many pieces do you submit?

Mama Coco’s dress has a very particular embroidery design on the front. How many different designs did you create to reach the final version?

It just depends. For example, if I’m working on a character and we’re trying to do variations of her outfit for two different days, I might do 11, 15 designs, or something, and then from that we choose the strongest ones. So we’ll choose five. In the end, we’ll choose two.

For the embroidery design on Mama Coco’s dress I only did two costumes, which was really nice. That’s the first one that I did, and then the only variations that I did were in color. I had two or three different color variations and then we ended up going for that one.

Talk about the process for designing Mama Coco’s dress.

it’s really nice when we don’t have to do that many passes. Because sometimes in art review, if something just doesn’t feel right, it can take weeks to get approved. And even if you show every week, it just really depends on whether you’re close to what they want or not. So it’s really nice when they like it the first time they see it. Then you’re like, “Oh yeah, great.”

For Mama Coco, we wanted her to be comfortable. We wanted her to be warm as well. Assuming she’s a very old lady, she should be warm and be wearing a sweater or wearing a blanket over her arm. But then we also wanted her to have the traditional dress on so we had

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About ‘Coco’

ixar’s Coco, the forthcoming Day of the Dead-themed animated feature set for release on November 22, is directed by Lee Unkrich

(Toy Story 3) alongside writer and co-director Adrian Molina and producer Darla K. Anderson. A multi-generational story about the power of family relationships, Coco follows Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), who lives in a lively Mexican village but comes from a family of shoemakers that may be the town’s only music-hating household. For generations, the Riveras have banned music because they believe they’ve been cursed by it; as their family history goes, Miguel’s great-great-grandfather abandoned his wife decades earlier to follow his own dreams of performing, leaving Imelda (Miguel’s great-greatgrandmother) to take control as the matriarch of the now-thriving Rivera line and declare music dead to the family forever. But Miguel harbors a secret desire to seize his musical moment, inspired by his favorite singer of all time, the late Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). It’s only after Miguel discovers an amazing link between himself and De la Cruz that he takes action to emulate the famous singer and, in doing so, accidentally enters the Land of the Dead. In the underworld, Miguel encounters the souls of his own family -- generations’ worth of long-dead but no less vivacious Rivera ancestors, including great-greatgrandmother Imelda. Still, given the opportunity to roam around the Land of the Dead, Miguel decides to track down De la Cruz himself. He teams up with a friendly trickster named Hector (Gael García Bernal) to find De la Cruz, earn his family’s blessing to perform, and return to the Land of the Living before time runs out.

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When did you discover your love of art? I started drawing my last year of high school. My mom’s very artistic and my sister has painted and drawn since she was little, and my dad’s actually a shoemaker just like Miguel [laughs]. I grew up surrounded by art, but I was never interested, because I wanted to do something different, I wanted to be a musician – also just like Miguel [laughs]. It was my mom who finally suggested I start drawing, I even fought her on it. She convinced me to take a line drawing class and I ended up loving it so much that I signed up for the rest of the semester. Then my sister, that same year, told me that our friend Alonso, who we knew growing up, was a director at [Disney Television Animation], and graduated from CalArts. When I heard about the school I knew it was perfect for me and I had to go. Alonso eventually helped me apply to CalArts, but I didn’t get in at first. So, I decided to move to France and attend a fine arts school to get better and build a stronger portfolio. I was there for a year and a half, and then went back to Mexico. I was determined to go to CalArts

still. So, applied again two years later and got in! Being in France helped me develop my technical skills. I still didn’t quite know what I was going to do at CalArts other than to draw, so I chose the experimental program. I was in animation for film and video, but also took music and costume design which was cool—all of those helped me in “Coco.” It’s been a lot of me not knowing and then just ending up where I am! What are some of your favorite tools that you use when you’re working? I like drawing traditionally, so I like drawing on paper a lot. I use the paper blocks that we have at Pixar, any kind of paper and pencil, or pen...that’s my favorite. If I have to do color work, I use gouache and then I scan that and then composite everything digitally before sending it over for review. That’s for concept art, mostly. But then if I have to packet something, then I’ll use [Adobe] Photoshop for mostly everything.

characters? For background characters, sometimes we have to work with what we already have in the library and then just modify that. Also, with sets, I forgot to mention it’s just one design and we just build on top of that and modify that, so like with characters sometimes it works the same way where we just take a character from our library, or a few characters, and then modify those to fit in the new world that we’re designing. For Coco, we had to design a lot of new background characters because we didn’t have that many in the library that looked like the characters that we wanted to design for this project. It was a lot of research and looking through research photos and my own photos that I had, and just kind of drawing people from life, and then, from there, deciding which ones were the most appealing and watering it down to a few. For costume design it’s the same process. We had a little bit less to work with for costumes, so we choose one or two shirts that worked well with other things like jeans and skirts, and then dressed them differently...sometimes we put a plain or patterned shawl on top of them for variation.

What is your approach to creating background

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Game on! An exclusive look at the creation of NieR:Automa t aí s beautiful concept art

By Kazuma Koda

ello, this is Kazuma Koda, concept artist for NieR:Automata. I am privileged to write this blog post and I hope you enjoy reading it. Next, I want to show you the process of how we created the art of NieR:Automata. The above images were captured ingame. If you’ve played through the game already, the amusement park it illustrates may be familiar already! I tried to capture a very specific time of day in such a setting; we’re at a point when the park’s evening events are just starting to kick off, and the park’s daytime attendees are starting to head

home. It adds to the atmosphere of both the location and scene. Personally, I really like this setting! But how did we end up with this final, evocative shot? Well, the concept artwork I am sharing with you today will showcase how it came to be. To ensure the artwork fitted correctly with the game’s style, I used a screen grab, taken from an early version of the game, to use as reference to capture the correct mood. Now, please let me show you the process of how the final artwork (which you can see above) was created.

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This picture is from the early stages of the game development. At this

An original juncture, the focus is on the gameplay, so the quality of art is not the screenshot taken priority. From the artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; point of view, this is the most painstaking part of the process; we need to imagine what the final form the in-game from the game whole art will take, and work towards capturing that. This early concept of mine was actually displayed for the whole studio to see, as it was used as a reference image. I felt embarrassed as it was incomplete!

For the next step, you start arranging the different elements thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll make up the final image in the correct order. At this point itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more a copy and paste job, but the intention is to create a really cool composition. For this setting, we really wanted you to feel the presence of the castle in the background, and give a sense of depth to the amusement park as a whole. By the way, the galleria-esque facility you can see in the middle? That was based on an idea from a level designer. I think it looks fabulous!

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Deciding composition

GAME ON!

Lighting and texturing

Next up, we added the sky and started working on the commercial area around the entrance. As long as you have the clear idea in your head, this was a relatively easy part of the work, as the process is mostly repetitive.

Check with Director

Next, we discuss with the gameâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s director Yoko Taro, to check whether the direction of the art is okay or he wants to add anything else. This time, he gave us some feedback such as to remove the reflection on the ground, add more lights and put debris everywhere at the forefront of the shot.

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5 Finish 32

At last, we completed the process, and this is the final version of the artwork. The idea is that while the image initially looks very glamorous â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as the best amusement parks are â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we start picking up on the smaller details, such as the debris, and you realise the entire setting has an uncomfortable eeriness to it. When you get to visit this area in-game, it would be great if you think about this art while playing!

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