Welcome to another League of Legends ArtBlast, this time on behalf of our Skins team!
Today we’ll be peeling back the fragile veil between our world and the Ionian spirit realm as we dive sword-first into the craft, care and love that went into our Spirit Blossom event. The narrative for this event takes players on a journey through a ceremony held annually by the Ionian people, during which you commune with fallen loved ones via the mystical Spirit Blossom flowers. As you will see, bringing that vision to life required an extensive amount of work and craft skill from many of our Skins productions teams.
As we started crafting this thematic, we quickly decided that the common thread for all factions, characters and Champions would be, very simply, beauty. This is a departure for us, as we often focus on creating conflicting characters in narrative and visual language, with a focus on appeal in many distinct forms. For Spirit Blossom, we wanted to approach these Ionian folk legends as mystical, beautiful and mysterious… with a more subtle moral compass. Once we arrived at this target, we held that throughline across all disciplines from Concept, 3D, Tech Art, VFX, SFX and Splash, all the way into our Marketing and Spirit Bonds product teams. At any moment during this event, as our players engage with this content, we wanted them to feel immersed in a gorgeous and surreal world filled with unique expressions of the characters they know and love.
This moment in League history was truly cross-team and collaborative, with teams from all across Riot contributing mountains of work to bring these tales of legend to life for our players, and we are proud to share this look behind the scenes. To our ArtStation community: Thank you, and may the spirit of Ionia guide you.