Baldur's Gate - Interview with Mike Sass

Couch spotted this interesting Gamerati interview with Mike Sass:

Mike Sass has worked on some of the game industry’s most storied titles, including the Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights series as well as Mass Effect, Dragon Age and the Star Wars game, KOTOR. He agreed to speak with us to celebrate the discovery of the original art of Edwin, the Red Wizard of Thay. Beamdog is making the Edwin portrait available on Fantasy Grounds and has posted an interview with FG’s Doug Davidson.

I’m sure you’re asked this a lot, but who are your artistic influences? You seem to have a lot of Curelo’s design in your Dragons.

For dragons, specifically, I am more influenced by Todd Lockwood’s 3rd edition dragon designs. Todd took pains to design them as real animalistic creatures with logical anatomy and natural details. At this point, everything has pretty much been done so its tough to be unique and design dragons that are totally outside of what we have seen before. The best you can do is to look at alot of reference and take inspiration while avoiding copying what is out there. Having said that I like dragons that look and move realistically with anatomy that relates to real-world creatures.

Artistically, I’m influenced mostly by the people doing exactly what I do and also in the same media. For instance I look at other good Warcraft art to make sure my work has the qualities I see in successful work for the same client and franchise. Furthermore, when I am painting in oils, I look at artists who are painting traditionally in the same media (most fantasy gaming painters use acrylics), becasue there are aesthetic qualities inherent in the tools. For oil painting, I look at Mark Zug quite a bit. He is one of the few other artists who uses oil paints for gaming products. He has been at it far longer than me and he has a very sophisticated style that I admire. Much of what he does the average person would not appreciate without looking at the original paintings, and I am very much into the originals having a nice craft and presence. While the stylistic qualities of various artists seem quite different, underneath the surface most artists are cognizant of fundamental compositional, design, drawing and structural aspects that you probably need to be an artist to appreciate. I am always influenced by artists that are doing these basic things well, regerdless of media or subject.

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