An Interview With Alex Figini, AAA Game Concept Artist
Alex Figini is a game artist veteran who’s worked on Mass Effect 3, Motorstorm, and Anthem. We chat about career experiences, influences and what’s next in store.
Is art something you’ve always had your sights set on? How did you decide on becoming an artist?
I was interested in art even as a kid, primarily from comics, anime and all the games I’ve played. As far back as when I was 7 years old, I really enjoyed in particular the artistic aspect of those media. I’d see cool comic book covers and imitate them in sketches. This was earlier on before I even had access to the internet, around 1990–1991. So it was much harder to get exposure to foreign styles.
Around that time we went on vacation in France to see some family, and they just so happened to have Dragon Ball on. We never had it on back home. I was like My god! This is on a whole other level. It blew my mind. The next anime I saw was the original Vampire Hunter D, though I probably shouldn’t have seen that as a kid haha. It’s pretty violent, but I turned out alright. So from then on, when I was able to select my courses, I would choose art whenever I could. That’s when I really made the conscious decision to pursue it seriously and not just as a hobby. If I was going to do something for the rest of my life, I’d better enjoy it.
Later on, I actually left secondary school — similar to high school in the U.S. — to do a two year art and design course when I was 16. There I learned all my traditional foundations. I got a good taste of different mediums. Lots of life drawings…I even had to learn textiles at one point. (Sewing is hard!) From that course, I built up a portfolio so I could move on to University studying multimedia design. A few of the modules focused on game art, so I really honed in on that. After Uni I had enough material to piece together a game art portfolio. It was a really awful portfolio looking back on it. That was around 2003.
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