Introduction
My name is Natacha Nielsen. I’m from California, and I currently work as a character artist on World of Warcraft. I’ve worked on several different student game projects in the past, but World of Warcraft is my first AAA game.
I grew up playing a lot of different games, and they were a massive source of inspiration when I would draw. In high school, I decided I wanted to be a concept artist for World of Warcraft since I loved the art and the story, and it was one of the games that inspired me the most to do game art. After starting at LCAD in 2013, I had my first 3D art classes, and soon after, my first texture painting class. I loved how handpainted, stylized character work really combines a lot of what I love about painting with 3D modeling. My love of hand-painted, stylized character art led me to switch my major’s focus from concept art to 3D character design. I spent a ton of time in World of Warcraft to better understand the style-language of WoW. I knew the road to Blizzard or any other AAA studio would be long, so I wanted to study as much as I could to get there. I eventually entered the World of Warcraft Student Art Contest in 2018 and was chosen as their winner in the character art category. Winning that contest put my work on people’s radar. That summer I was offered an internship as a character artist on World of Warcraft and I’ve been working there since.
Approach to Stylized Characters
With stylized characters your shapes are going to be very important: you need to have something that reads well even at a distance. One thing that I feel is important is not to get carried away with detail. If you put it everywhere, things get muddy and you lose your focal point. I usually start my character designs with some very rough sketches to figure out what exactly I want to do. I explore what kind of shapes I want to use, thinking about what the personality and body type of the character is. Once I have a sketch that I like, I will refine it and edit it as I need to and then do some color explorations. From there I will do a quick low-poly block-out in 3ds Max, then bring it into ZBrush and sculpt a high-poly model. For hand-painted characters, I generally don’t bother sculpting in every last bit of detail since I will be painting it in any way later on.
