Feature art by: Dragon Rock, Maciej Drabik.
ArtStation, the Gold Sponsor for the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize People’s Choice award 2022, fosters artist growth with its hosted ArtStation Community Challenges. These challenges are broken into concept and production phases. Each phase has five categories, spanning: Keyframe Design, Character Design, Environment Design, Prop Design, Visual Effects (VFX) Design, Game Character Art, Film/TV Character Art, Game Environment/Level Design, Prop Art and VFX Animation. Artists are challenged to create artworks based around a central theme with real-world briefs and deliverables, and their works are judged by a high-profile judging panel of game and film professionals.
ArtStation’s tenth Community Challenge was Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms. This ran from July to September with 15 industry-based challenge hosts, new Visual Effects (VFX) categories and a completely redesigned challenge platform. Like all ArtStation community challenges, the submission process was entirely open, and close to 6,600 artists took up the challenge to imagine the Dragon Age. Submissions across all categories approached the levels of quality you’d expect in game or film projects, with hosts and fellow entrants providing encouragement and feedback to push artists to create their best works.
Impressively, an all-star judging panel took on the difficult task to sort through the very strong entries in all categories.
2022 judging panel:
Yekaterina Bourykina (Riot Games), David Nakabayashi (Industrial Light & Magic), Virginie Bourdin (Art of Direction), Devon Fay (Riot Games), Sandra Duchiewicz (Freelance), Conar Cross (Playground Games), Tyler Smith (ProbablyMonsters), Finnian MacManus (Terraform Studios), Greg Rutkowski (Freelance), David Shovlin (Riot Games), Sjors de Laat (Tuatara Games) and Grace Liu (Monomi Park).
Now, ArtStation is very pleased to showcase the winners of each challenge category of the Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms challenge. 1st, 2nd, 3rd place, plus five Honorable Mentions, were awarded in each of the categories. Interestingly, a record 45% of the 80 winners for the challenge were female or non-binary artists, reflecting a more inclusive group of challenge entrants than in previous challenges.
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Keyframe Design
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Keyframe Design: Sergey Grechanyuk
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Character Design
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Character Design: Mole Wang
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Environment Design
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Environment Design: Yuyun/Jessie Jiang
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Prop Design
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Prop Design: Valeria Ivanova
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Prop Design: Valeria Ivanova
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – VFX Design
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
VFX Design: Jeanluc Kol
If you have some time, don’t hesitate to take new challenges and be opened to other domains like character design, animation, color, graphic design etc. For me, it is the best way to get out of my comfort zone and keep myself inspired.
Jeanluc Kol
3D PRODUCTION
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Game Character (real-time)
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Game Character (real-time): Yumi Batgerel
This is my 6th Artstation challenge because I love it! It’s a great opportunity to learn new stuff, reunite and discover talented and inspiring artists in the industry.
Yumi Batgerel
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Game Character (real-time): Yumi Batgerel
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Film/VFX Character (rendered)
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Film/VFX Character (rendered): Mikel Rekondo
I’ve been following Artstation challenges for several years, I always have a great time and they allow me to test my limits, learn and create a new portfolio piece.
Mikel Rekondo
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Game Environment Art (real-time)
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Game Environment Art (real-time): Sophie Rose Stübinger
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – Prop Art (rendered)
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
Prop Art (rendered): Alina Pesotskaya
Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms – VFX Art (real-time)
1st Place Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms
VFX Art (real-time): Darin Aranda
No matter what level you have or if you finish the Challenge, it’s an exciting experience to do and you can learn a lot from the community. I would like to encourage all the people that didn’t take part in the Challenge, do so.
Darin Aranda
If you’d like to check out more of the challenge winners, or take a look at their complete submissions, please visit the Dragon’s Rise: The Forgotten Realms challenge results site.
Previous challenges including the ILM Art Department Star Wars Challenge can be found on the ArtStation Challenges site, and a new challenge will be launched on Monday 9 January 2023!
