The concept that employers would seek out specific illustrators for what they’ve shown to be experts at wasn’t exactly foreign to me, but it wasn’t something I had given a lot of thought. I want to be a 3D Character artist, and Character Concept artist. I had never exactly devoted my time to improving therefore I feel like I’ve fallen behind in terms of industry standards. Late 2016 I begun devoting most of my free time to studying art fundamentals. After a couple of months tackling perspective, I’ve now just begun studying Hampton’s Human Gesture book. Soon I’ll be moving on to digital painting and color and light theory as well as color composition, which will allow me to perform master studies. After first reading Yuko Shimizu’s my first thought was “I want to be known for creating dope character designs of course.” But it hit me that dope character designers come in the dozen. After some thought, to me it’s clear that I want my sketchbooks to be filled with studies of every kind. I want to not only be known for designing and modelling great characters. I want to be known for demonstrating an absolute mastery of art fundamentals which I can use to my advantage to be an extremely flexible artist.

Peter Mohrbacher is a concept artist whose work can be found in many Magic the Gathering cards, a feat in and on its own. Mohrbacher’s passion project, “Angelarium” begun as his fascination for the lore behind many mythical angels from different cultures. Angelarium is a collection of digital illustrations of mythical angels as interpreted by Mohrbacher. I have been a big fan of these amazing illustrations for several years now. The mood that the color palettes, painting style and setting create have been incredibly influential in my taste and aspirations in terms of concept art. The piece I’ve chosen to review is Tamiel, The Sight Unseen by Goni Montes and ironically, for Angelarium.

This piece stood out to me more than any other for a couple of reasons. I’m a big fan of digital art, and I completely suck with color. The feeling of an overwhelming deity reminded me a lot of Angelarium, and to my surprise, this is a piece of a work created specifically for it. After doing some research on it, I couldn’t find anything related to the design process involved in creating this illustration. But thankfully, Mohrbacher himself stated in a reddit post “Normally I’m self posting around here, but this time it’s for my buddy Goni Montes who created this awesome fallen angel painting for me.” As I was wondering why the style of his other pieces in the collection was so different from this one.

This is Tamiel, Angel of the Unseen as illustrated by Peter Mohrbacher himself. All of his illustration sport this same eerie and mystical feeling to them. From what I could gather, Montes’ illustration was some form of fan art or collaboration created for his friend’s collection.

From the two, I’d personally lean more towards Mohrbacher’s version. Montes’ use of perspective successfully creates a feeling of omnipotence. It makes the viewer feel smaller, lesser-than this deity. But Mohrbacher’s mastery of color is such an amazing sight (ha). The focus lying so heavily on the angel design itself, and how well it blends with its surroundings… I just can’t help but love how mythical it all feels.