Riot Games League of Legends: Phoenixmancer Art Blast

By Daniel Wade - November 2, 2021

Hey everyone!

Welcome everyone to the League of Legends Phoenixmancer Art Blast! We’re super excited to show off all of the amazing work that our artists put into creating the Phoenixmancer skinline. When thinking of the word Phoenix, I don’t think anyone could go on without immediately thinking about Anivia, and we felt that turning her into the god she deserves to be was a great place to start.

As always, a quick disclaimer that there are many incredible teams at Riot that help make all of these things a possibility, and from beginning to end, there’s countless amounts of passion and effort that is poured into making it as great as it can be. But today, we’re going to specifically look at the work done by the Skins team! Thanks to everyone who was involved, we couldn’t make these happen without all the support!

As we touched on a bit earlier, all of this started with a simple idea, the Phoenix. As the world we live in gets smaller and smaller, and everyone becomes more and more interconnected, we felt that the Phoenix could be a perfect symbol of that–an amazing mythological creature that from the east to the west spans across cultures and boundaries; a being that represents rebirth, hope, and wonder.

It was fairly obvious from the beginning that Anivia would be the star of our show, and so that’s where we began to explore. We wanted to incorporate the positive themes of the Phoenix by using motifs such as strong virtues, wondrous spectacle, and elegance for the skinline. Using those core ideas, we began to think about what Anivia would look like as the skinline’s titular Phoenix. At first, we created a variety of celestial or divine-like versions for Anivia, but then quickly came to an idea that rather than attempting to be just a divine being, she could be the one who represents virtues, and bestows power onto others as champions of those virtues. So, we came up with the idea of using colors to represent the various virtues, and that Anivia would be simpler and colorless, representing that she embodies all the virtues together as one.

Once we got the core of the ideas settled down with Anivia, the champions and their skin designs quickly followed. Elegance and grace was something we wanted to represent, and so for that we chose Seraphine. On the other side of the spectrum, we wanted to choose another virtue that was slightly more aggressive, and so we went with Xayah for Bravery.

I hope you enjoyed the bit of insight I could provide into our thinking process when creating these skins, and that it provides a little bit of context for all the great work from the team you’re about to see below! And as always, if you’re interested in learning more about our open art roles at Riot Games, check here for more information!

Alex Pei
Producer, Riot Games