Meet the Team — Ásgeir
Ásgeir Jón Ásgeirsson is a painter, illustrator, tattoo artist, and the creative force leading the Civitas art team. This time we decided to do a bit more extensive Meet the Team by making a whole companion video, which you can watch at the bottom of this article.
Enjoy the read (and the video)!
— Giorgio ‘Error 404’ Crosali
Tell us a little bit about yourself, who is Ásgeir?
I studied fine art and painting. I was always going to go into that. Somehow I ended up in the computer game industry 25 years ago, I’ve been there ever since. I worked as a concept artist for EVE online, or CCP games making EVE online. Became the art director and was there for 17 years.
I left CCP and worked on various projects, making album covers, illustrations, books, all kinds of materials and freelance stuff for other games.
I’ve been working here for a year as the art director.
You mentioned working as a concept artist, tell us more about your team and describe to us in short, what you all do.
For Civitas we have three artists, including me, working on concept arts for the characters and environment of the characters.
Ásta is mainly working on clothing and character art, Amy does the background and mood sketches, and dioramas. I do everything in between art directing.
What has been your favorite era or favorite character to design?
Not necessarily my character, I did keyart for the game and in the keyart I had this mystical shaman looking at a futuristic city. I asked Ásta, one of our concept artists, to design that character. I think that character incorporates the style of the game. He is mystical and a bit strange. Kind of like an iconic category, doesn’t look like anything else.
On the shaman you can see all these details and changeable items, can you tell us more about it?
Think of the characters as an archetype, then you make two very distinct variations of the characters and blend them together to create thousands or hundreds of NFTs. On those characters we have modular items that change and have a rarity to them that can be common or rare.
You talked about the way you were into the EVE online scene, you’ve done a lot of sci-fi, and now we are looking into a completely different scenario, how did that come about?
I’ve done a lot of sci-fi and realistic, dark, gritty sci-fi. With Civitas, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to have brighter colors, more stylist art style. I went a bit into my roots.
I learned to draw as a kid from comics. Mobius was one of my favorite artists. So I thought a Mobius style game would be something cool. So I developed a style.
I took inspiration from the boldness of more commercial comics like Marvel. So our style is in between this bold commercial style and the artistic, strange, European comic style.
We’re not far away from our first character in the collection, that’s going to be released soon, obviously as NFTs. Looking at our collection, they are very broad. We got different culture, different themes. Where did you draw the inspiration for that?
I wanted to have at least one theme based on each period from the game. The first period, you would start out as prehistoric and then you would move onto classical and all the way up to modern and futuristic.
I wanted to have one theme that represented your first situation in the game. Prehistoric, then I wanted something very different and Cyberpunk was the choice for that, that is something I am pretty used to.
We went deep into studying references for the periods from all over the world. The team and I like history, historically accurate stuff but we allow ourselves a lot of freedom. Artistic freedom. Strange and mystical are the keywords and that is how we expanded from realistic.
What fascinates us the most are the elements, the details. Like you said, you spent a lot of time researching. Can you take us a bit through the process?
What I do when I am designing is that I make up these little stories. I usually don’t design without making up a story in my head. So even a spear has a story to me, like it was handed to the character by his father. It was damaged in battle and was decorated with stones given to him by his wife. Even created a story of how a damage on a jacket came to be.
All of it might not be available to the viewer but it inspires me to do better art, and that is what I ask of my art team.
Everything you design, you create a story. We could make a little book about just that. That is amazing. That shows how much depth goes into creating these characters. How do you pull this out everytime?
I love the creation process. It is my favorite part. Making stuff, making new things out of nothing. I don’t really know how I pull it off.
It’s passion. It just happens, with passion and love for what you do.
Follow Ásgeir on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asgeir_jon/
Want to know more about the people behind Civitas? Consider checking out the previous issues of Meet the Team:
Kent Byers, CPO — https://medium.com/playcivitas/meet-the-civitas-team-1-kent-byers-a81206ea1257
Ólafur Lárus Egilsson, Tech Artist — https://medium.com/playcivitas/meet-the-team-2-%C3%B3lafur-c1cadcf43ca7
