George Kamitani

The illustrator I've chosen to talk about is the president and one of the founders of a small gaming company, known as Vanillaware. While they've only made a small number of games as compared to other much larger companies, Vanillaware's titles are known and well loved for the effort and detail put into their artwork. They're also known for sticking with purely 2D art and animation in their games, in a field where almost everything besides portable and largely independent games use 3D graphics. In fact, the main reason I was first attracted to their games was because of the high quality 2D art and animation, since I prefer 2D to 3D.

As the president, Kamitani is responsible for much of the artistic design and direction of the games. He helps design the characters, produces official illustrations of them, and also helps animate them. His style and character designs, though they range slightly depending on the current game, tend to be very cartoony, having elements of both eastern and western cartoons. The proportions on the characters vary wildly. Physically stronger characters and giant monsters tend towards giant, hulking brutes with the classic exaggerated huge upper bodies and muscles combined with much smaller lower bodies, whereas more magical based characters or less physically powerful characters tend to have smaller, thin bodies with bigger heads. Most of the protagonists are in the second camp. Older characters such as adults will usually have more standard human proportions, though still with some exaggerated characteristics.

His works are very detailed, with tons of small and large touches that make the character designs very visually interesting. Armored characters tend to have elaborate armor, with lots of interlocking pieces and designs on the armor itself. Their clothes also have lots of bright colors and interesting designs, and many characters have costumes with other colorful details to really help them pop out. Despite the detail of the designs and images, however, they never became too chaotic and distracting. I think this is largely due to the color choices, with the vivid colors separating different parts of the costumes and characters. This is also apparent in the games themselves, where the character sprites and the backgrounds are all very detailed, but all stand out due to the different colors used for each, with the backgrounds having more subdued tones and the characters being brighter and more colorful, but not so bright as to clash.

Another thing I love about Kamitani's art is the way he paints and colors. He is very adept at blending different tones and colors together, such as skin with touches of reds, pinks, blues, and yellows. Such subtle shifts in temperature make for some really visually interesting coloring, and add good contrast to the overall image. His treatment of the image is nice as well, with a good mix of both lots of blending in places such as skin and stronger blocks of contrasting color in places such as clothing and armor. All in all, his cartoony style that plays with proportions to suit the character combined with very nice use of color and very detailed designs overall make his work and Vanillaware's games be unique and very visually interesting and engaging, and is the main reason why I am interested in their art and games.