Hello everyone! I've been many many times asked about my techniques and how some particular thing in my works is done. And also about what kind of photo references I use and who other artists I admire etc.

I visited a couple of days ago Kazuo Oga's exhibition in MOT in Tokyo. (Kazuo Oga is my hero, and the master overlord who has painted almost all backgrounds of Studio Ghibli's animes, for example "My Neighbour Totoro" and "Howl's Moving Castle".) He's also working for Katsuhiro Otomo's new Freedom project. Absolutely stunning skills! I recommend that you watch all of Studio Ghibli's Animes and then watch them again with pause button!

These pictures below are from a book illustrated by Oga.


In the exhibition there was also a replica of Oga's studio's painting table, with some real reference photos he has used for his marvelous works. And it was soooo interesting for me to see parts of his studio and some of the original photos he uses as models!

Many times I see works of different artist I wonder how the first sketches look like, what kind of references he/she uses and so on. There are not many places where you can see other parts than the final work, and of course, seeing sketches and references and the work in progress, takes away some of the mystic of the final work. A magician should never reveal any secrets but I think seeing these things would be very interesting for some other artist and want-to-be-artists. So, I was thinking that may be I would want to start a blog about all these things you don't see when looking at the final work.

Some parts of the work in progress can also be so hilarious that it may be funny to see it. For example "The Tales From the Earthsea"-cover art I did back in 2002. In the original photo reference  I pose as the wizerd of Earthsea, in the living room of my old apartment with a sheet and a broom stick.

Here's the final work...


And here's the original.

As I said, it takes the magic away, sorry.

But still I decided to start writing this blog. I'll post here some details of older works, of some ongoing projects with some early sketches and also some photo references. Of course some projects are I'm involved in are secret or heavily copyrighted so I'm not able to show anything of them. For example I cant show anything from Max Payne 1 or 2, sorry about that.

In the beginning this blog may be a mess, because usually after I finish a project I clean up the harddrive right away from any old sketches and modelphotos and other stuff. That's why I'll explain only shortly something about older projects, but I will be more precise with my future work. I don't make any promises of updating this on weekly bases, but I try to update it everytime I'm working on something that fits to this blog.

So, this blog is not a portfolio, you can find my portfolio at www.samisaramaki.net. Everything I post here of course is strictly copyrighted and I would appreciate if you wouldn't copy any of this stuff anywhere. And I think these things I write are interesting only those people who are or want to be in illustration & design busines, for others this may be boring as hell. So, please welcome to my artist blog.