An Interview with Milica Čeliković- Concept Artist and Illustrator
Milica, an artist from Serbia, has been creating game illustrations for nine years. She’s currently working on Hearthstone by Blizzard and Lorcana by Disney. She’s also worked on game titles such as Minion Masters, War Dragons, Teppen, Clash of Clans, Empires & Puzzles, KeyForge, and others.
Her favorite projects are in fantasy, dragons in particular.
She’s currently part of Mooncolony Art Studio and its sister company, Lunar Academy, where she also participates as a mentor/teacher because they were a big part of the start of her career.
As a way to break her introver shell, she started taking public speaking engagements. This might include representing the studio I work for, giving talks as an individual artist, or signing cards for fans. Still, if you ask what she does most of the time, it is sitting in her room, drawing on a PC, surrounded by her animals and plants.
Here we go deeper into her experience and advice.
How did you get your artistic start?
I have been drawing for as long as I can remember. I would chase animals and small critters in ponds and forests and always sketch something in dedicated notebooks. I would draw animals and, when I was outside, try to observe them to understand shapes and how to achieve them in drawing. In primary and middle school, I participated in art and biology class competitions, and I did win some awards, mostly locally between schools.
I tried my hand at clay crafting, digging clay next to the same pond I had newts, fish, and snakes in, too. Imagine my mother's disapproval seeing me either muddy or carrying toads and snakes back in our yard. I'm not sure which one she didn’t like more of a three. I think I still have some of the notebooks where I would draw fan art, animals, and characters most of the time.
While still in school, I started drawing digitally once I bought my first smallest Intuos and started practicing with care. Now, I had many more possibilities and wasn't limited by physical art materials. Only later, when I started working professionally, did I start giving more attention to realistic human portraits, as clients wanted personalized commissions.
Profits from this helped me to continue doing just art so it was immensely important that I make people portraits as good as I can, this also widened my range of skills which is a good thing, going out of my comfort zone to learn something new.
What training did you have? Did you like it?
Where I came from, it wasn’t encouraged to pursue art as a career, as people were more concerned with basic occupations.
So, for college, I became an IT engineer. While studying for that parallelly, I have discovered DeviantArt, and with that digital art and graphic tablets and that people draw fantasy and all kinds of amazing stuff with that art community.
You can say I am self-taught. I watch tutorials and speed paints on YouTube, look at other people's artworks and try to emulate how they stylized and rendered characters, and learn through Schoolism courses and such. Soon enough, while learning more and spending a lot of hours practicing and making personal art, people started asking me for commissions and giving me my first jobs.
So it was great progress when, among other bigger names, Marc Brunet reviewed my portfolio on YouTube and gave praise, told that this is a good example of someone who can work for Blizzard and that gave me even more motivation to become better and confident to create for big IPs.
What would you consider your big break in the industry?
Starting with full-time work, not just freelancing, and getting a nice monthly salary would be the first clue. As the years pass, I still cannot believe that I can draw staff and people pay me to do so. Also, all my work is with distant foreign countries through the Internet, so that’s probably why it looks so unreal, not to say easy, to me.
My first full-time job was seven years ago. While I learned a lot watching other art colleagues' work in progress, hearing the art director explain and overpaint, and seeing how the work and implementation process go, it's sad to say that that game didn’t go out to be alive and have intended players. Unfortunately, the project was shut down.
After that project was over, I started panicking that this was a one-time shot, that they made a mistake with choosing me as they made a mistake with poor choices for game development, and that surely other people in the industry won't find me interesting enough to invite me to their projects. So I started panicking, applying to every company that had a form for open roles to any art position and hearing nothing from them. Most of them were not what I was looking for anyway but I felt I was in danger and started grasping any straws. A few months of freelancing was nice until I found an indie company where I enjoyed creating illustrations and assets for the next two and a half years.
I have always worked from home, and I'm not sure if I should tell this, but it's so funny that I have never been in a physical office. Only a year ago, I started going to other countries on business trips and seeing my colleagues in person at events.
I would say you know you made it when you stop applying and start getting emails from clients inviting you to work on their projects.
But first, you need to work on building your skills and portfolio, social media presence, and actively showing your work online. Also, it doesn’t hurt when your favourite artists, ones whose work you admired forever, follow you back, giving you the feeling that they acknowledged you and the hard work you put in for years past.
Why did you decide to focus on fantasy creatures and game illustrations?
Fantasy is a big genre. I love watching movies and anime, reading books, and constantly reimagining what if. It's a way of stylizing real life. Sure, it's nice knowing how to draw and render realism, but why limit yourself if you can make it cooler, more interesting, blow out of proportion elements to make them fabulous or powerful looking, and give them more character?
Also, is it fantasy or realism when we try to reimagine how dinosaurs looked? We cannot know for certain how their feathers looked, what colors they were, or where they had more tissue, additional organs, and such.
So as an artist you have to make it look believable while trying to imagine something you couldn’t physically see but you also need to know the biology of animal, their physical characteristics, their diet, size, and also their environmental factors such as climate, predators or rather food chain, flora as it will impact their mimicry and camouflage and many other insights will influence your decision for shape, color and anatomy of your scientific drawing.
As a kid I would always draw animals. I grew up in a village on a homestead, next to a forest with spring and meadows so it was my everyday life. I find them fascinating, I want to collect them all as Ash collects Pokemon. I want to know more about their habits and behaviors, anatomy, abilities etc. Still today even if I don’t have much free time me and husband always have pets, take in animals that need care so we foster them until they are ready to go back in wild. Also whenever I visit a big city with a nice zoo or botanic gardens I go there to spend a day.
And on the game part of the question, yeah, I love games. They are also full of art, which is the whole point of all of this. It's one big effort of a group of developers to put all that art into an enjoyable bundle. I would waste hours and hours for days in RPGs and sandbox games, mostly in fantasy genres.
What is your favorite part about your job?
That I get freedom to create what I would do in my free time anyway and to be able to make a living from it. Sure it comes with many responsibilities and even scarier, deadlines, but it's nice to do things you like and be respected for it. Also when the art director is considerate of my personal preferences and they give me briefs that they know I will like to contribute to.
Also, recently, I started paying more attention to compliments. When people bring me cards to sign that I illustrated, comments in person feel much different from ones online, as now you have a face, a smile in front of you attached to that compliment, too, so I see how people enjoy something I helped create. I appreciate every compliment about my artwork, but it still feels weird, and I'm not sure how to respond or accept them.
What is your favorite thing you’ve created?
Personal series of tiny dragons, I am much slower now with making new ones illustrated but I am working on it and always saving new references, writing notes and making new sketches that I would like to add to that series.
Because dragons can be whatever attributes you decide to add to a creature and mix it together, there is no strict definition so it's a great outlet to whatever creative fantasy creature you had in mind.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
This is a dreaded question whenever I am in a business interview or now. :) I like where I am now, but I would like to have a bit better balance between the personal and business parts of my day as most of the time, I have obligations that need to be finished or artworks made late in the evening or over the weekend, responding to emails, showing up to meetings, and such.
What advice would you give artists just getting started?
I encourage artists to cherish their personal artworks, have fun creating them, and take their time. I interact with many artists who are still learning and still waiting to get their first job, but many of them are a bit hasty and impatient.
They ask many people for opinions on their work but don’t take enough time to implement feedback and to practice, to do studies. I understand that earnings are important to all of us and that the industry is changing where it is harder to find a job but if you don’t have fun time making art it will be a miserable experience and constant panic.
Try also to balance practicing (basics such as anatomy, values, lighting, etc.) and making personal, close-to-your-heart artworks. If you only create fantasy artworks without references you will not learn much and your skills will stay in the same place, on the other hand if you only do practice and do anatomy, technical drawings, perspective cubes, shading practices etc. you will “lose creativity” and will sit in front of empty canvas void of any idea for imagined artworks. At least that is what I noticed with myself and other artists I talk to.
Ah last one I promise, going out of your comfort zone. Whenever I get new things I never dabbled in before, such as sailing ships to draw, projects that include drawing hard surfaces, or sci-fi, I learn something new. Don't be always shy when you get an opportunity to work on something new, is it scary, yes but it's a new learning experience. With that comes much more work opportunities and you unlocking new skills, so don't be stubborn and lock yourself just to narrow style or subjects.
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