Concept artist and art lead Ilya Kuvshinov

By Jim Thacker - July 24, 2014

Ilya Kuvshinov is art lead at Lithuania-based mobile and social game developer Game Insight. He was previously art lead at visual novel developer NARR8, working the motion comic Knights of the Void, to which he contributed storyboarding, direction, coloring and character design. He was also lead concept at Globo Games, contributing character design, location design, GUI design and texturing. As a freelance illustrator, his clients include IDW Publishing, creating the cover art to its new Silent Hill comic series. We caught up with Ilya to discuss his career, his unlikely journey from architect to illustrator – and his gorgeous, painterly art work.

Tell us about your journey

Since childhood, I’ve loved comics, video games and animation. I wanted to be a writer, but for some reason, I began to draw, and still cannot stop.

I trained as an architect – I didn’t think that I could make money doing what I loved – but it turned out that all that was needed was to be bold: I created a visual novel that drew the attention of videogame magazines to me, began to draw videogame-themed illustrations, then started to work as concept artist for a game developer and quit architecture. Sometimes, I can’t believe that this really happened myself.

How do you want to impact the world?

I want to create stories that will make people happy. Open an animation studio? Open an game development company? I don’t know yet, but I’m glad that there are so many ways to tell stories.

What are you passionate about?

Stories! There is nothing better than stories – the stories of my life, stories from a stranger, fictional stories – all of them have so much influence on us. I’m also passionate about difficulties. People often ask me why I always draw girls. At some point I began to draw girls because I drew them the worst. So I’m still doing it!