Featured Pro Portfolio: Daniele Afferni
Daniele Afferni is an Italian comic illustrator and concept artist who also works in advertising. With the newly released Sidewinder theme, he organized his sidebar so that visitors can easily browse through his different styles, subjects and mediums.
Check out Daniele’s ArtStation-powered portfolio website.
Read on in his interview to learn how his ArtStation Pro website helped him get his first game job with a Japanese studio!
How did you get your first job in the industry?
I was very young when I started working as a concept artist in adv market, hired for the renowned Armando Testa agency; there I had my first experience as storyboard and concept artist. It was a pre-computer era (Jurassic now!) so I had the opportunity to learn a lot of manual drawing techniques (oil, watercolors etc), drawing – literally – billions advertising stories, at various levels of definition. There I also learned the “art of storytelling”, a prime skill in comic art. After a few years, I become a freelance, and with two associates, I founded ASC studios – still active as top-class suppliers of pre-production visuals and concept art.
What kind of experiences or training brought you to where you are today?
My story is a peculiar tale really. Although I was born as comic artist, attending a school of comics in Italy, I became a comic artist a long time after. Advertising is time-consuming business but I always considered it too small for my art and I always kept spaces for other ways to express myself as an artist. For instance, my fine art feats led to exhibitions in London, Berlin, Milan and New York. But finally – the time has come for comics: right through my ArtStation Pro website (thanks Art Station!), my work grabbed the attention of Japanese game design studio Bushiroad, and they hired me to illustrate the official Dragoborne tie-in comic.
This exciting experience lasted for over a year has made me grow up in comic skills, re-awaken my never completely dormant passion for drawing and rekindling the great fire of the storyteller that burns inside me. I currently working professionally in both advertising and comics, publishing among other for Aces Weekly, the comic magazine founded and edited by David Lloyd (co-author of V for Vendetta). As a concept artist, I’m working with my ASC studio team on a long project for a new horror videogame. It’s still top secret so I can’t talk about it yet (but I could anticipate the game will be a great game!)
Tell us about your favorite project or artwork.
One of my recent favorite artworks could be my Galactus Heralds. There was already a digital version of this artwork, previously featured in a solo exhibition in Milan, but an American private collector had fallen in love with it and asked me to re-do it in watercolor. It was very gratifying for me to create it. I usually do my artwork in full digital but sometimes it’s just so satisfying to get a little messy with real paint.
If you could land any gig, what project would you want to work on?
Someone once told me that I always look like I just landed from a UFO, so “landing” fits perfectly… As a comic artist my ongoing goal is working for big international publishers, especially the ones in superheroes area, that suits me more than others. As a concept artist, it would be very exciting to work on huge projects like LOTR or similar Weta big productions (I know, I dream big…)
The bigger the project, the more resources you’d have to experiment and create new exciting worlds. After all, that’s really what drives concept artists crazy, isn’t it?
See more of Daniele’s work on his portfolio website. To learn more about ArtStation Pro websites, click here.
