It's safe to say I was already on board with the hype after seeing the spine-chilling trailer and movie posters for Resident Evil, but the film itself exceeded expectations. With immersive worldbuilding, a surprisingly hilarious script and a healthy dose of fan service, it's a treat for RE fans and horror buffs alike. Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the film already – you have been warned.

The terrifying scene occurs when our protagonist, Bryan Hodukavich, is making his grand escape. Turning to face the nefarious farmhouse, he sees a series of disembodied limbs slowly creeping their way around the doorframe, prompting him to flee immediately. (Props to Cregger for finally making a realistic horror movie protagonist.)

A small but effortlessly creepy scene, it would be easy to assume it was created with VFX, but it turns out Cregger opted for practical effects for maximum terrifying realism. Behind-the-scenes shots from movement director Jakub Hudlický show how the scene was meticulously choreographed, resulting in a scene that's wonderfully uncanny and tense.

"I really thought that was CGI. So glad you guys did some practical effects," one fan praised. "Best shot in the movie," another wrote, while one admirer added that the scene was "one of the coolest shots of the movie and an insane standout in the trailer!"

As someone who's particularly fed up with CGI overuse in movies, I'm delighted that Cregger took the time to use practical effects throughout Resident Evil. Not only does the tactile filmmaking make for wonderfully creepy visuals, but the human graft behind the work makes it feel all the more special when watching.

For more movie news, check out fans' reactions to the Resident Evil logo or take a look at our review of Resident Evil Requiem.

Nintendo Switch Prime Day deals are here as Amazon's October sale gets underway. We'll be honoring our tradition of tracking the best Nintendo Switch deals live throughout the sale, from Switch bundle deals to discounts on games and accessories. Basically, if there' are any Switch discounts to be found this week, you'll find them here.

Things are off to a great start for readers in the UK, where there's £60 off Switch 2, now reduced to a record-low price of £354.99 at Amazon. There are discounts on games too.

In the US, deals on consoles are less likely. My top pick right now is the Switch 2 + Mario Kart World bundle for $549 at Amazon.

Below, you'll find quick links to the best Nintendo Switch deals across all retailers – yep, we're tracking everywhere, not just Amazon! Scroll down further for our rolling updates, comment and analysis.

If you find you need Prime membership for any of the deals that come up, remember that you can get a 30-day free Prime trial.

• Browse Nintendo Switch at Amazon

US Prime Day Nintendo Switch Quick links

• Switch 2 Mario Kart World bundle: $549 at Amazon
• Nintendo Switch games: up to 50% on Switch Games at Amazon
• Resident Evil 2 Deluxe for Switch 2: 25% off preorders at Nintendo
• Renewed consoles: up to $30 off renewed Switch consoles at Amazon
• Resident Evil Requiem, Switch 2: 29% off at Amazon

UK Prime Day Nintendo Switch Quick links

• Switch 2 console: £419 £354.99 at Amazon LOW PRICE
• Switch 2 + Donkey Kong Bananza: £473.99 £443.99 at Very
• Switch 2 + Mario Kart World: £478.99 £448.99 at Very
• Nintendo Switch Games: Save up to 40% at Amazon
• Switch 2 Zelda Ocarina of Time: £5 off preorders at Amazon

Top US Prime Day Switch deals

Top UK Prime Day Switch deals

Below, he introduces three characters from his personal project Stone Decay. If you need the tools to develop your own worlds, see our guides to the best drawing tablets and the best laptops for drawing and digital art.

Céléana

“This is Céléana, the main character from my one of my personal projects: Stone Decay. It’s really fun to put a fantasy character in a more modern world.”

General Fairlois

“This is Céléana’s mother, General Fairlois. It was fun to create visual clues that show their family connections, but also highlight their differences.”

Frank

“Finally, this is Frank from the same universe. He’s a centaur working as a taxi. It was really fun to imagine people using the centaur as a transportation service.”

You can see more of Edwin's work on his ArtStation profile.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

Today's drawing tablet deals

See our guide to the best drawing tablets for more options.

Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
Download the Creative Bloq app for iOS
Download the Creative Bloq app for Android

The Benq PD2732U benefits from all this, as well as a particularly good colour gamut, making it a candidate as one of the best monitors for graphic artists. On paper it may look like ‘only’ another 60Hz IPS, with none of the extra excitement OLED or 120Hz displays bring, but it’s plenty bright and sharp enough for those times when colour accuracy matters most.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Useful USB hub and KVM
• Easy to assemble

There's usually very little design differentiation when it comes to monitors. They’re all rectangles, usually with a little stand underneath and some plugs on the back, and the Benq PD2732U is no exception. What this means is that the details really matter, and Benq has made this monitor really easy to put together and use.

You assemble the stand by screwing a single thumb-turned bolt in, then clip it into the VESA mount on the back of the screen itself. Rather than use a power brick, the Benq PD2732U connects to the electricity supply with a standard three-prong plug, meaning less to clutter up the space behind your desk, and the main inputs face outwards rather than downwards, meaning they’re easy to find and push plugs into at the slight cost of the screen not fitting quite as flush if you push it back against a wall.

The USB hub output does face downwards, and is conveniently situated just under the left-hand edge of the screen. There are three USB-A ports, a Type-C, and a headphone socket under there, which is really good to have especially if you’re connecting it to the kind of computer that doesn’t have any Type-A ports of its own. You’ll get 7.5W of charging out of two of the Type-As too, though they can only manage 5Gbps of data throughput. The Type-C Thunderbolt 4 input at the back will put out 90W of juice, ideal for single-cabling a connection to a laptop or using a mini PC like the Geekom IT13 Max that can be powered that way. There's another Type-C on the back that acts as an input for the KVM, alongside the HDMI or DP, so you can switch between computers easily.

Over on the left are some controls for the OSD that are a little fiddly but hopefully, thanks to the inclusion of Benq’s HotKey Puck G3 - a wireless (IR, like a TV remote) OSD controller - won’t get too much use. The IR receiver is a little rectangular bulge on the left, right next to the glowing orange standby light. It’s a useful way to interact with the screen and change its settings, though it will need to be kept somewhere safe and close to the monitor, or it’s going to get lost.

Design score: 3/5

Features and performance

• Good colour gamut
• Only 400 nits even in HDR

Without a trendy OLED panel or sky-high refresh rate, the big selling point of this screen is its colour coverage. Benq says it’s made for graphic design and cross-media workflows, with a particular focus on being connected to a Mac (hence the Thunderbolt input). It also attempts to ensure consistent colour and brightness across the entire screen, something that’s a lot easier with an LED backlight, as here, than with the old folded-tube method.

We don’t usually run Datacolor’s brightness consistency test, so there's nothing to compare the Benq PD2732U to, but at 100% brightness it showed a few percentage points of variance across the screen, divided into nine areas. At 50% brightness this fell to less than one percent in most areas, with the exception being the top right-hand corner, which was showing a higher result.

In Display P3 mode, the screen produced a colour range of 100% sRGB, 87% Adobe RGB, and 97% P3, and there's plenty of adjustability in the screen’s colour settings for you to go chasing those final few percent. While the screen claims a 400nit brightness in HDR mode, in the SDR used by the Datacolor test it could only squeeze out 200nits, a slightly disappointing result. Setting your OS into HDR mode unlocks the extra brightness, boosting it up to the claimed 400nits.

Feature score: 3/5

Price

It’s possible to pick up MSI’s 32in QD-OLED 4K 240Hz gaming monitor for about the same price as this Benq, which is available for $699.99 or £649.99, while LG will sell you a 27in 4K IPS, in the form of its Ultrafine 27US50Z-W, for around £180. You may be torn between buying the Benq and something either much cheaper or bigger and brighter. What you’re paying for here is the accurate IPS panel (the LG will only show 90% of DCI-P3) rather than the pure brightness and speed of the OLED, so it may make more sense for a professional setting.

Value score: 3/5

Who is it for?

• Graphic designers

This screen is tailor-made for those who spend their days staring at InDesign or Photoshop, and who care about the colours being accurate across various media. That’s not to say it can’t do other things, as the pleasing way it displays colour is going to make photographers and videographers happy too, but it’s those who worry about the slight differences between Pantones who will be best served.

Buy it if...

• Colour accuracy matters to your work
• You don’t need a higher refresh rate
• You can feed it a Thunderbolt signal

Don't buy it if...

• You want to play high framerate games (or video)
• You need something larger
• It’s too expensive for you

Also consider

That's because Beezy is an AI data centre. He looks all warm and cuddly, promising to bring us a technological revolution and yet-to-be-demonstrated super abundance, but when you squeeze him, he emits a painful ear-piercing wail.

AI data centres are among the most loathed developments in communities across the world right now. As well as their size, consumption of resources and heat generation, there's the issue that they tend to emit a noise that makes Extreme Noise Terror's seminal A Holocaust in Your Head sound like an album of bedtime lullabies.

Residents stuck with data centres near their homes complain of living in a nightmare, unable to sleep and with little prospect of being able to sell to move elsewhere. Beezy is one New York design agency's contribution to the debate, examining the emotional packaging of the tech.

Basura worked with the musician Big Data to create the handmade cuddly toy, whose "voice" was recorded outside an AI data centre in Virginia. The toy is part of a satirical campaign that invites people to 'Adopt a Data Center', reimagining the giant pieces of AI infrastructure as rescue animals seeking homes.

As part of the project, Basura founder Rajeev Basu interviewed people who live near data centres to learn about what they're suffering. He says he's not anti-AI but wanted to encourage debate about responsible use of the technology. The satirical approach is intended to highlight the absurdity of the data centre building drive when it has such a negative impact on communities.

Just 20 Bezzy toys were made as part of the release of Big Data's EP 4.0.

Some fans think the team is adopting the game's vice theme a little too enthusiastically by charging $55 for a shirt. But the design is spot-on perfect.

You've preordered the game, now you can preorder the T-shirt and cap while you wait. Over at the Miami Heat store, the Vice City Collection features on-brand neon hues, retro typography and some sleek streetwear styling that could rival many big-name fashion drops.

One design stands out: a design with the legend "Went to Vice City and All I For Was this Lousy T-Shirt" pays homage to Tommy Vercetti's iconic "I completed Vice City" outfit from 2002's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I have a feeling that's going to make it a hit among fans for the nostalgia value alone.

And if you're going to pay $99 for a game that doesn't even come on a disc, what's $55 for a T-shirt? Now bring on an official Tommy Vercetti Hawaiian shirt.

The main Prime members' sale starts today, and the Apple deals are already the best we've seen since the hikes in June. Prices are naturally higher than what we would have expected from a sale a year ago, but the Prime Day Apple deals below at least bring the cost of new 2026 tech back to pre-June MRRPs. That includes this year's M5 MacBook Air from $1,299 $1,099 at Amazon and the AirPods Pro 3 for $249 $179.

In most cases, the deals I've picked out below don't require Prime membership. If you do see an offer come up for members only, you can always sign up for a 30-day free Prime trial, which you can cancel afterwards if you don't want the other benefits.

The best Prime Day Apple deals

• Browse Apple Prime Day deals at Amazon

Prime Day Mac deals

Prime Day iPad deals

Prime Day Apple accessory deals

Amazon Prime Day is today! I know many people might have deal fatigue, but it's a reminder that we're nearing the manic retail season right before the run-up to the big 'C' word, and there are deals galore on creative tech, but more importantly, Prime Day discounts on 3D printers.

This is great news for anyone not wanting to wait until Black Friday to grab a bargain, or if you already own one of the best 3D printers, then it's an opportunity to stock up on materials, accessories, and filament while it's cheap.

On Amazon, it looks like 30% off the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2 Combo is the offer to beat. You can also snag up to 50% off materials like TPU and PLA Pure over at Bambu Lab thanks to the Halloween Sale.

Stick with me on this live blog for regular updates on 3D printing October Prime Day deals as and when I find them, and check out the Quick Links section below to be taken straight to the offers.

Retailer Quick Links

• Bambu Lab official store: Halloween flash sales and discounts galore
• Amazon: Prices slashed on a variety of brands
• Anycubic: Combo offers and clearance deals
• Elegoo: Top deal - 31% off + spin the wheel for extra savings
• Creality: Up to 50% off Flash Sale (printers, engravers, scanners)
• FlashForge: Prime Day Sale - with up to $150 off
• Snapmaker:  $150 off the Snapmaker U1 + filament bulk sale

Top 3 deals

Equal parts ingenious and wonderfully silly, the new Street Fighter ad breaks the conventions of typical billboard ads, not just thinking outside the box, but destroying it entirely. A delight for fans and an eye-catching marvel for passers-by, the design is a prime example of how billboard advertising has recently levelled up.

Looming over the streets of LA, the dramatic billboard ad features an image of Street Fighter's iconic protagonist, Ryu, performing his legendary hadouken move. The force of his attack has seemingly obliterated the ad, with torn paper details and a trio of construction workers hanging on for dear life, marking its destruction.

"I thought the people were real at first," one X user commented. "Sheesh, who's gonna pay for the damage?" another joked, while one fan added, "Love this creativity! More."

This immersive billboard advertising style has been growing in popularity in the last few years, proving that plain ol' ads just aren't enough. With creative digital ads dominating our screens, the world of OOH advertising has been forced to step up, giving us amazing campaigns like Dreamies' cat invasion or Final Destination's terrifyingly real ad destruction.

When the original Gears of War landed on Xbox 360, I'll be honest, I wasn't thinking about Marcus Fenix or wondering how I'd look with a soul patch (terribly); I was staring at the walls. Unreal Engine 3 made slabs of concrete and rusted girders look like the future, and Epic knew it, so the engine was as much of the pitch as the chainsaw bayonet. Nearly 20 years later, Gears of War: E-Day pulls the same trick with Unreal Engine 5, only now the walls are in on the fight – you can climb them, hide behind them and, a few minutes later, watch them come down on your head.

Don't worry, it's still gloriously meatheaded. This is a game where a man the size of a wardrobe revs a chainsaw bolted to an assault rifle and saws a giant underground monster made of fingers in half while blood gushes over the screen, where the guns boom like an afterburner, heads leave bodies in a red plume – “look ma, no face!” shouts Fenix – and every few minutes something enormous crawls out of the dark to remind you humanity has made a terrible mistake.

It would have been easy to leave Gears of War as an Xbox time capsule, soul patch and all, but The Coalition did something smarter and loosened the whole thing up, adding new weapon mods, explorable min-sandboxes, and more ways to move and kill. And while this review only covers solo play through the campaign, with online four-player co-op, horde and versus modes, and more to enjoy at launch, it shows an impressive blend of old and new ideas paired with strong tech.

The biggest change is movement, which is now more flexible and adaptable. Gears has always been a game of finding cover, leaving cover, finding more cover, and occasionally performing unpleasant chainsaw surgery on whatever got too close, but now you can sprint, slide, jump, crawl, climb and mantle without snapping to a wall first, and you feel it immediately. It keeps that heavy, armoured Gears weight, just with a bit more give in the joints for Marcus and Dom.

It means I began to change how I look at a street and what's possible. I’m no longer scanning for the nearest waist-high wall any more; I am instead looking up, across, through gaps in buildings, and with Locust pushing hard and the AI more aggressive than I remember, I find myself scrambling onto a truck, mantling onto a balcony and taking a sniper shot from above instead of backing into the next chest-high slab of concrete. Two decades of Gears taught me to look for cover, but now it’s E-Day, a series entry that occasionally asks me to find a route. It changes the level design because it no longer looks like a street of usefully placed blocks; instead, it resembles a real-world place littered with possible cover spots.

Welcome to Kalona

Kalona isn't an open world in the Gears 5 sense; it is still a linear shooter at heart, but bigger chunks of the city let you wander off, poke around, tackle side objectives – usually helping hapless civilians from a gruesome death or defending a position – and hunt weapon mods before heading back to the main mission. The Coalition has learned from Gears 5’s open world, wound it back, and layered in more ideas. These are maps that work best as mini-sandboxes built around Gears combat, and they work better than I expected because verticality matters and there’s always a little hidden skirmish to elbow your way into, a secret ‘hardcase’ containing weapon upgrades or world-building lore to uncover.

Then there's the destruction, which is where Unreal Engine 5 earns its keep and does what UE3 did for Gears - a tech demo supporting new game design ideas. A rumble somewhere off-screen, the corner of a building folds into a cloud of dust that rolls across the screen, and the city has changed shape – gorgeous, obviously; this is one of the best-looking games I've played, but it's also a warning, because seconds later an E-Hole glows red and the Locust come pouring out.

Wretches skitter over the rubble and onto my chainsaw, Drones push up, Boomers soak up everything you've got, and the bigger beasts from the Hollow turn a simple firefight into something nastier, all good, all very intensely Gears. But the tempo has shifted: a teasing open space becomes a sniper’s killbox, but I counter with a portable gun turret, scale a house and find my own spot to scope from. The trick is that battles here rarely feel staged; the world is shaky and open enough that the fight seems to happen because I took a wrong turn, not because I tripped a checkpoint and kickstarted something pre-planned.

This obviously ties into the setting and moment in time, and E-Day is at its best when it's about Emergence Day: the moment nobody knows what's going on, things are crawling out of the ground, and the city is crumbling. The opening hours lean surprisingly hard on the unknown – the armour, the swagger and the big guns are temporarily gone; civilians are running, buildings are coming down, and creatures are chasing people down previously serene streets, and for a moment I'm right there with them.

Obviously, it doesn’t take Fenix long to suit up - we learn the lore of the chainsaw - gather a ragtag new squad and rub against authority. The gunplay remains heavy and furious; ammo empties like a loo roll aisle in a pandemic, and within a spin Gears is back. But the series has always managed to skirt two worlds, the power armour fantasy and pure horror, and The Coalition understands how to push and pull you through its world with aplomb.

One sequence stuck with me: a foggy forest following a crash leads into a ‘tank cemetery’ littered with the carcasses of old war machines and brimming with creatures to chainsaw, and beneath it the collapsed streets, tunnels built from whatever has been sucked down from the city above – chunks of road, subway cars, whole houses – all smashed together into something grim, oppressive and weirdly beautiful. I like the Gears best: the spectacular and the horrible sit side by side, and you can laugh at a chainsaw execution one minute and creep through a blood-soaked building the next.

New mod cons

Scattered around the maps are supply caches for optimising loadouts and Hard Cases that hand out mods to turn familiar guns into something more personal, such as explosive ammo, improved weapon handling, scopes, magazine sizes, and reload buffs. And much of it is designed around mastering the Perfect Reload mechanic, so timing a reload precisely can now kickstart a stack of buffs.

This mix of useful stat tweaks and changes that fundamentally alter how a weapon behaves gives me a reason to care about every back street and side quest in Kalona. It isn't Gears-as-RPG, thankfully, but it lets you build around how you actually play, and I ended up with a health-recovery build that fed on cover kills, enemies revealed by the Pulse Drone, and chainsaw executions, so the more aggressively I played, the longer I lasted.

The weapons you can tweak are a mix of old and new. The Prototype Lancer and Lancer Mk1 deliver the series' familiar assault-rifle brutality, the Hammerburst goes back to the punchier feel of the original, and the Gnasher is still the Gnasher, which is to say point-blank problem solving at its finest. New toys like the Ripper, Incinerator, Striga and Gut Puncher stop it from feeling like a Greatest Hits compilation, and the enemies have had similar attention – Reavers reshape a battlefield by moving around it rather than hovering as flying targets, and Seeders are proper encounters now instead of something you plink and take potshots at from a safe distance.

My favourite thing, though, is just wandering around inside the city. Every shop window, hotel lobby and car-strewn street seems to have a reason to be there; emergency lights glimmer on wet surfaces, abandoned stores hold the leftovers of ordinary lives, and Kalona feels like a city that existed long before the Locust turned up.

Gears has always mashed together military sci-fi, Americana and brutalist concrete, but here we see the world before it turned into the grey ruin of the original trilogy, and the art team has gone for a collision of 1940s and 1970s Americana, disco-glam, Art Deco, military hardware and retro-futurism. It shouldn't work, but it does because it feels like a place that evolved its own design history rather than an art department being told to make everything look Gears. An ornate Art Deco building half swallowed by a technological war, a spotless piece of civilian infrastructure ripped open by an E-Hole, a familiar gun redesigned as an early COG prototype. And this is why a prequel is worth doing (and I did have my doubts about going backwards, not forwards) because it's less about younger Marcus and Dom than about Sera before it became Gears of War.

Cracks in the concrete

E-Day isn't perfect, as the game's scale and its dramatic ebb and flow can occasionally funnel you into bullet-sponge traps and face off against new and frustrating enemies that can one-shot you with little warning, though I did find a comical hack by tapping dodge and pinballing from literal pillar to post to avoid sudden death (the dodge system is quite lenient). The side content also too often feels like an excuse to chase another collectable or upgrade, and it can feel like repeated horde encounters. And for all the new flexibility, this isn't a systemic immersive sim; the rhythm is still move, shoot, flank, reload, execute, repeat, which is both the game's greatest strength and, now and then, its most obvious limitation.

But I never wanted E-Day to reinvent the core Gears formula. The original changed shooters because it showed up with the right tech at exactly the right moment, and now everyone knows what a Gears game is supposed to feel like, so The Coalition has done the sensible thing and made that formula less rigid – bigger but not too empty spaces, more verticality, destruction that changes a fight, enemies that behave differently, weapons you can build around and a city you can explore rather than just run through. It's still silly, still violent, but now there's simply more room to play around inside its core systems.

Which fittingly brings me back to the engine. Unreal Engine 5 is a flex here too, just as Unreal Engine 3 was all those years ago, now with MegaLights, Nanite, Lumen, Chaos Destruction, and more, all coming together to smack you over the head and impress. The ray-traced lighting, freeform destruction and sheer density of Kalona make the original look almost quaint.

But just as what happened back then happens again, E-Day grows beyond a tech demo and finds its own personality as part of the series and as a great shooter. And when you stop noticing the tech and just wallow in the world-building and combat, when I’m rerouted by a fight, when a Locust hoard made me rethink how I move around and up and over the environment, and when an E-Hole opens in an unexpected corner of the battle, it’s fitting that the tech has become the thing that makes the game design possible.

My Gears of War: E-Day review code and access was provided to you by XBOX.

Whether you're shopping for a die-hard who owns every Blu-ray or someone who just loves the DB5, here are the best Bond gifts, from cars to puzzles and books to boxsets. You'll even see a deal on that exploding pen from Goldeneye (exploding capability not included).

Over the years, we've seen a variety of designs, proving that there's no formula to the best Olympic logos. Equal parts vibrant and playful, the new Brisbane 2032 logo is certainly worthy of joining the ranks.

The Brisbane 2032 Olympic logo features a vivid design that emulates the dynamic Olympic flame, but a closer look reveals an ingenious triple design. Inspired by Australia's native cockatoo, the iconic pink-and-red crest turns the emblem into a living, breathing logo bursting with character, while its shape represents Brisbane's home state, Queensland.

"If we had our time over, maybe ​there ⁠are different ways that we could have done it," said Brisbane 2032 chief marketing officer Brent Hill at a press conference. But despite the unplanned premature reveal, he shared, "the reaction to [the emblem] has been really positive."

For more creative news, check out the 15 best Olympic Games poster designs or take a look at how the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 identity was created.

Across social, younger brands are reaching for analogue aesthetics, old-school formats and cultural references that pre-date them, not simply because retro is having another moment, but because nostalgia offers something increasingly scarce online: familiarity. And they’re hardly alone. From the fixation on “2016 vs 2026” to the resurfacing of Tumblr-era aesthetics, pop culture is increasingly looking backwards for its creative cues.

If heritage once depended on history, the more interesting question now is whether brands can detach heritage itself from chronology.

Creating a time that never was

There’s a word for this: anemoia, nostalgia for a time we never experienced. We can feel familiarity with worlds we only know second-hand, from the crackle of vinyl to the whir of an old games console.

And for brands without a century-old archive to raid, that has weight. Heritage can be built from recognisable codes: typography, packaging, photography, sound, language and behaviours that evoke a particular time or feeling. Done well, those elements create familiarity before a consumer has any history with the brand itself.

That doesn’t mean inventing a fake founding story. Heritage is traditionally factual; the opportunity here is emotional. Brands can create a world that feels as though it has always existed without pretending that it has, manufacturing familiarity rather than history.

Nostalgia as an antidote to sameness

That familiarity is particularly powerful when you consider the environment brands are operating in today. Social trends now move at such speed that identities can become disposable. A visual language can be adopted, replicated and exhausted within weeks, leaving brands chasing relevance rather than building recognition. The sans-serif blanding that overtook tech branding is a useful warning: optimisation can quickly become indistinguishability.

Nostalgia offers an emotional anchor.

In a digital world where everything feels new, fast and optimised, references to the past can suggest something slower, more tactile and more human. The appeal isn’t about being old-fashioned or living in the past. It is about creating contrast with an algorithmically driven present.

But this can’t just be a grainy filter or retro typeface. Nostalgia works when brands understand the emotional qualities underneath the aesthetic. Is it optimism? Rebellion? Escapism? Community? The creative challenge is to identify that feeling and reinterpret it, rather than simply reproduce its visual shorthand.

This all makes specificity important. When VML introduced the new EV charging brand IONNA to the market in 2025, the team looked back on the nostalgic age of the American service station. Instead of a futuristic visual language that is usually seen in the market, they instead bought in retro architecture, welcoming canopies, and familiar roadside cues that drew on the optimistic hospitality of an earlier time. IONNA didn’t have that heritage, but through this specific intent and brand vision, it felt like something that had been a part of the American psyche for decades.

From museum to cultural playground

Perhaps the biggest difference between traditional heritage and this new form is who gets to shape it.

Old-school heritage was a museum: brands controlled the archive and audiences were invited to admire it. New-school heritage is a playground. Audiences can remix references, resurrect forgotten products, turn old advertisements into memes and give cultural artefacts entirely new meanings. The role of the brand is to give them something to participate in, not simply something to look at. The best nostalgia becomes social material: something people can play with, personalise and pass on.

That is why the current nostalgia cycle is more interesting than another round of retro-revivalism. It suggests heritage is becoming less about how long a brand has existed and more about how successfully it can create a recognisable world people want to enter, inhabit and help shape.

For newer brands, that creates an unusual possibility. You don’t need decades of history to feel established. You need distinctive creative codes, consistency and enough emotional truth for people to feel that they already know you.

In an age obsessed with what and who comes next, looking backwards can be a powerful way to build forwards. The real power of anemoia is not pretending to have a past. It is creating a world that feels strangely familiar, then inviting people to make memories inside it. Heritage may once have been something brands inherited. Increasingly, it is something audiences help them build.

We’ll look at how I develop the concept, build a composition that guides the viewer’s eye, establish clear focal points, and use lighting, depth and contrast to strengthen the story. More importantly, I’ll explain the reasoning behind every decision, because a cover is more than simply technique – it’s visual storytelling.

For this workshop I’ve chosen the Corpse Knight: Story So Far variant cover. This special edition brings together the story from the first three volumes of the series. I was commissioned to create all three variant covers within a very tight schedule of about a week, and that challenge made every decision even more important.

There wasn’t time to overthink, so every line, shape and design choice had to be clear, purposeful, and serve the story. Today, we’ll follow the first of those covers, from the initial concept to the finished artwork. By the end, I hope you’ll understand not just how this cover was created, but why each choice helps turn a single image into an invitation to read.

If you need to build your own art setup, see our guides to the best drawing tablets or the best laptops for drawing.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
Download the Creative Bloq app for iOS
Download the Creative Bloq app for Android

Today's drawing tablet deals

For some, the upcoming series looks wrong, not because the actors are different but because of the colour. It looks colder and darker than the warm, saturated Warner Bros movies. Some say the aesthetic is Voldemort's work, but one expert identifies more muggle-influenced reasons for the radically different visual style.

First, here's the trailer so you can see what people are talking about.

The new Harry Potter series is getting a major holiday release, with the first eight-episode season – Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – to premiere on Christmas Day. HBO's thinking it will make for perfect festive family viewing. But given the massive popularity of the books and the movies, it's inevitably sparked a huge amount of debate on social media. There are over 17,000 comments on the video above on YouTube alone.

Discussion covers everything from the actors to the soundtrack and whether we need another adaptation of Harry Potter at all. But one topic really stands out: people are trying to get their heads around the colour grading.

The trailer might not be representative of the series' final grade, but fans immediately noticed that it's a stark departure from the 2001 movie. People have been dissecting the trailer frame by frame and posting side-by-side comparisons to highlight how much darker and moodier the series looks.

Some are reminded people of recent movies that saw debate about their colour grading, most infamously Wicked. That's raising doubts about whether it's a considered stylistic choice or just part of a trend.

Some of those commenting on social media have been asking for professional explanation. Jakub Golis has one. He's the in-house videographer at MPB, a major online platform for used photo and video equipment.

Jakub agrees that part of the reason for the Harry Potter's new look is fashion. There's been an inexorable rise of teal and orange colour grades, from the big screen to the small screen and the even smaller screen in social media content. The trailer certainly goes heavy on the teal.

"By pushing shadows toward cool teal tones and skin tones toward warm orange tones, filmmakers create strong visual contrast, which makes the human skin tone stand out more," Jakub notes.

"Like everything else, the look of movies and TV series also follows trends. The dark, moody, desaturated colour grading with colours often leaning on the teal-orange axis has become something of an industry default for blockbuster movies over the past years."

But a bigger cause may be technological. Filmmaking has changed a lot in 25 years. The eight main Harry Potter movies were all shot on 35mm film. Today, most movies and series are now shot digitally (unless they're made by Christopher Nolan).

Digital cameras have a much wider dynamic range and better low-light capabilities than traditional film cameras This gives directors of photography the leeway to film in lighting situations that would previously have been impossible. They can film with darker lighting and still capture detail in a scene, and they can shoot high-contrast scenes without worrying about blown highlights.

Finally, fashion and technology aside, the new Harry Potter's colour grading also reflects creative intent, Jakub reckons. the movies were aimed at kids, and the first two were directed by Chris Columbus, who made comedies like Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire. HBO's Harry Potter cinematographer Adriano Goldman has said that he wants the new series to be more realistic and grounded.

"Every generation of filmmakers gets new tools, and those tools change what's possible creatively," Jakub says. "Digital cameras today have amazing and far more functions compared to what was available in 2001. Combine that with the popularity of the teal and orange style, and the darker mood of this generation – it's a different set of creative possibilities for DOPs, shaped by both the technology and the tone of the times we're in."

Speaking of controversies, Warner Bros and HBO now belong to a new parent company: check out the branding for Skydance.

What makes the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art stand out is that it includes not only classical art, but also modern works. People often see old oil paintings as "art" and hold them in high esteem. But media like comic books aren't necessarily given that same deference. I mean, there's a bias against animation as a lesser art form, primarily aimed towards kids. Sometimes, video games aren't even considered "art" either! (That's the approach our sister magazine ImagineFX takes, and has taken, over the years: interviewing everyone from Frank Frazetta to Moebius, and artists behind Dune and Star Wars.)

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art brings these different mediums together, ensuring each is seen and experienced with equal veneration. Throughout the galleries, you can see how art changes over time, and how any of the pieces can inspire new forms of storytelling.

The museum itself is located in Los Angeles, California, near Exposition Park. What I particularly loved about this location was how accessible it was. Los Angeles is known for being a car-reliant city, but it has a pretty decent metro and bus system that's been continually improving over the years.

If you come in by car, there's a nearby parking garage where you can drop it off. A nearby Metro station puts you within walking distance of the museum, making it less of a hassle than getting to other places in Los Angeles.

Entering the Library and learning something new

When you walk into the museum, you see two large buildings. On the left is the educational centre, which mainly houses the three-floor Research Library. The right side is home to the main attraction: the many different kinds of galleries. It's worth noting that the library is free to go in and see, but most of the museum, namely the galleries, is off-limits unless you purchase a ticket ahead of time. Since the museum just opened, demand is high, and you likely won't be able to get a ticket on the day, so you'll need to plan ahead and buy one online.

I went ahead into the library first, with the ground floor dedicated to books that informed the art and artists featured in the museum's galleries. It was filled with so many books I'd never heard of or seen. These include the coffee table photo book A Day in the Life of America by Rick Smolan and David Elliot Cohen, as well as the biography The Red Rose Girls: An Uncommon Story of Art and Love by Alice A. Carter.

The former's deep blue nighttime cover depicted the age of cowboys as a seminal era of American history, while the latter's flowery cover reflected the lives of various female artists in the 20th century. While this is my first time encountering these books, their covers grabbed my attention simply because they're eye-catchingly beautiful and, admittedly, not much else.

You're encouraged to read these books in the library and return them after you're done. Even if you do nothing else in your life except read these books, I don't think you'd even have the time! But what makes the library even more special are the second and third floors.

The second floor is called Skywalker Ranch Library, which contains books that Lucas and other filmmakers consulted for research and worldbuilding. The third floor contains about 3,000 art books donated by actor Steve Martin and his wife. Unfortunately, these two floors were off-limits, so I couldn't get a close look at any of it. But the sheer amount of literature confounded me and showed me that inspiration can really come from anywhere.

Going into the gallery

Next up, I headed into the main attraction: the galleries. On the first floor, there's one titled "The History of Narrative Art: Heroes, Myths, the Sacred." It was a pretty short showcase, and the art was exactly what you'd expect in a museum. This gallery was filled with famous fine art, including reproductions of Rembrandt's The Night Watch and the Portrait of Henry VIII. To be honest, I started off my sightseeing tour a bit disappointed and bored. So far, this first gallery felt like most other historical museums I've been to.

But I'm glad I stuck around, because the exhibitions suddenly became more interesting. The second floor is where you'll spend most of your visit, and it has the most visually diverse art in the entire museum. These galleries were categorised into genres like fantasy, the Wild West, and science fiction. There were also specific spots within the galleries dedicated to a single artist, such as N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. As someone who's not really in tune with fine art, the artist-specific galleries flew over my head, but I appreciated how splitting the artwork by genre helped customers pick and choose what they're personally interested in.

For starters, the Manga gallery really interested me. It focused on older properties rather than the modern shows, such as Astro Boy and Akira, as well as other seminal Japanese shows like Kamen Rider. My personal favourite was Naoyo Kimura's self-portrait of Pikachu in a grey felt hat. Yes, it's the same one from 2023 during the Pokémon x Van Gogh collaboration. It brought back surprisingly nostalgic memories of a time when Pokémon card scalping wasn't quite as bad as it is now. Maybe I'm looking back with rose-tinted glasses. But even so, I still remember people trying to sell that particular card for inflated prices, given how rare and novel it was.

The shining star of all the galleries, however, was the dedicated Star Wars one. It was the only one with a line for those who wanted to see it. But don't worry, it went by really quickly. As someone who didn't grow up with Star Wars, I thought it was an incredibly impressive gallery. It's filled with paintings from every era of the venerable sci-fi franchise, including original trilogy concept art by Ralph McQuarrie. One that stood out to me was Aaron McBride's production art for Revenge of the Sith depicting Anakin and Obi-Wan's Battle on Mustafar. I've never seen the movie before (the only one I've seen is Solo: A Star Wars Story), but through many cultural references in other media, I'm well aware of their showdown.

The gallery also had a few 3D sculptures showcasing the franchise's costume designs, including Trisha Biggar's Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith and John Mollo's costume for Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. My personal favourite was seeing Doug Chiang's Darth Maul on a Sith Speeder, part of the production art for The Phantom Menace. Keep in mind, I don't have strong nostalgia for these characters! But I remember seeing Darth Maul in a commercial as a kid and thinking he was the coolest villain ever, more so than Darth Vader, which is probably why this particular piece resonated with me the most.

I came into the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art expecting mostly George Lucas and Lucasfilm-related material. But I came away surprised and satisfied that there wasn't much of that at all. The Star Wars gallery, in particular, made up only a fraction of what the museum offered. It has an eclectic collection of artists and pieces from multiple genres and time periods. This approach creates much more breadth and depth in the visiting experience. Lucas and Hobson intended to bridge classical fine art and modern art in a single location where they're revered in equal measure – and they succeeded.

They can also be beautiful pieces of design. There are lots of aesthetically pleasing vinyl players out there, from budget gems with vintage looks to sleek minimalist masterpieces providing superior sound.

Whether you’re looking for a separate or an economical combo with speakers, I've picked out some options that all have decent discounts at Amazon that make them as cheap as just $29! I've ordered them by price, going from budget to more high-end audiophile turntables.

If you really want to delve into the audiophile world, check out our guide to the best audiophile headphones.

A24 has made some iconic indie movies in recent years, but merch has typically been kept to the usual movie posters and T-shirts. Taking thinking outside the box to a whole new level, the new Robert Pattinson nesting dolls prove that A24 knows its demographic.

There are six mini Pattinson's in total, featuring the following characters: Reynolds "Rey" from The Rover, Constantine "Connie" Nikas From Good Time, Monte from High Life, Thomas Howard from The Lighthouse, Charlie Thompson from The Drama, and finally his latest roll as Chris Hansen in Primetime.

The collection is not only conceptually iconic, but a great display of Pattinson's wide range of A24 roles. While I'm slightly sad there's no Edward Cullen (Twilight sadly isn't an A24), the nesting dolls are just the right amount of niche bizarre to get me reaching for my wallet.

"This month I'm working to buy myself my Robert Pattinson Russian dolls," one dedicated fan wrote. "Just bought Robert Pattinson nesting dolls at almost 30. I love being me," another confessed. I initially thought these were little Robert Pattinson acrylics for your toes to get a Patticure," a more confused fan wrote.

Sadly, the Robert Pattinson nesting dolls are already sold out, but you can join the waitlist on the A24 website. For more film news, check out how The Backrooms' director used Blender to build a 30k-square-foot set or take a look at why Robert Pattinson’s Primetime performance is cinematic perfection.

Although I don’t depict them, they are an essential part of the narrative; they serve as a background story element to inform and inspire consecutive decisions made during the creation process. Having a solid story idea really helps at all stages and keeps you focused on what’s important.

However, what made the biggest difference on the technical side was using 3D and a proper reference board. Here's how I approached the piece.

If you need to build your own art setup, see our guides to the best drawing tablets or the best laptops for drawing.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
Download the Creative Bloq app for iOS
Download the Creative Bloq app for Android

Today's drawing tablet deals

The publication of a huge batch of patent filings shows that the creative tech giant has plenty of ideas about where it could take things next, and that includes into field where Adobe doesn't currently have a strong presence.

• Get a free trial of Adobe Creative Cloud Pro

As noticed by the patent tracking site Patentlyze, the US Patent and Trademark office has just published a series of patent filings from Adobe. One of them describes a method for creating navigable 3D worlds from text descriptions.

An example use cited describes a user typing "a foggy Japanese garden at dusk" to generate said 3D environment. A non-specified AI model would first build an intermediate "spherical" 2D picture of the space, like a 360 view produced by stitching 3D scans. That would then be fed back into a second AI process that would use it as a basis for the construction of 3D geometry.

The output would be viewable from multiple perspectives, and the user would be able to move forwards and backwards to explore the environment.

Even with today's procedural tools that allow artists to generate assets using rules, building 3D environments is a time consuming process that requires potentially hundreds of individual assets that are digitally sculpted and then painted with surface details.

Adobe has a suite of 3D programs in its Substance collection of apps. Substance Painter is fairly popular for that part of the process, but Substance 3D modeler remains a relatively niche choice compared to the likes of ZBrush and Blender, with its main advantage being the seamless switching between desktop and VR. For now, it's one of the Adobe programs that hasn't added Firefly-powered generative AI tools.

Adobe's not the only company exploring the idea of text-to 3D world generation. For the moment the nearest thing are tools like Blockade Labs' Skybox AI , which generates 360-degree scenes from text prompts, but these are quite some way from navigable environments for games or VR and AR.

This is just one of the dozens of patents from Adobe published in recent weeks. Other filings include concepts for an AI tool that builds new camera angles from a single photo, one that finds matching materials across 3D models and a tool for rendering a 3D garment preview.

A patent application doesn't necessarily signal a development intention. Companies file patents for various reasons, including to try to prevent competitors from using an idea and to show shareholders that they're being innovative.

Personally, though, I do like using Adobe software. In fact, I've been doing so for 30 years now, which suggests they're doing something right. And honestly, I don't enjoy writing critical pieces too much; I'd far rather praise people when they've done something good. Which is what I'm about to do here.

The good news is that Premiere mobile, which launched on iPhone last year, has finally arrived on Android, and it's free. And let me be crystal-clear. You don't need a Creative Cloud subscription to use it. Which I think is epic.

Indeed, if you're happy with the basic editing experience it offers – trimmed down from the full-blown desktop software – you don't even need an Adobe account. Nor are there any watermarks, ads and interminable upgrade prompts. Double hooray!

What you get for free

So what, exactly, are you getting? Well, the free tier is surprisingly meaty. There's a multi-track timeline for layering video, music, text, voiceovers and effects. There's frame-accurate editing for timing cuts to the beat. You can record voiceovers directly in the app. Plus something I think content creators will prize above all else: Enhance Audio, which cleans up background noise in a single tap.

Add in creator-made templates and unlimited 4K exports to that mix, and you've got everything most social video creators will be looking for from a quick and easy-to-use app.

Not all features are free, though. Firefly-powered features such as Generative Fill, Image-to-Video and Generate Sound Effects run on generative credits, which you'll have to buy. But that seems fair enough to me.

The limitations

A word of caution, though, before you get too excited. The app requires Android 13 or later and at least 5GB of RAM, which rules out plenty of Android budget phones. That's a shame, because affordability is one of the main reasons people plump for Android phones over iPhones.

Plus, as I mentioned, a lot of features you're used to using on desktop are currently MIA. Keyframes, beat detection, Adobe Fonts, enhanced captions and, a little frustratingly, the ability to continue editing a project on Premiere desktop are all marked as "coming soon".

And let's not be realistic. The free app is also a shop window. Adobe is clearly hoping that once you're hooked, you'll start spending for extra features.

Why this is good for creatives

That said, overall this is exactly how Adobe should be treating its audience. For many years, its approach has been: sign up for a serious standing order first, then we'll talk. Free Premiere, in contrast, earns trust first and asks for money later, or maybe never.

That's good sense because the next generation of content creators aren't starting out on a desktop; they're starting on phones, with something like CapCut. If their first serious editing tool is a free, watermark-free Premiere instead, Adobe has a real chance of keeping them for the long haul. No wonder the latter includes features aimed squarely at vertical video and YouTube Shorts.

And who knows? If Adobe carries out releasing useful tools like this, with no strings attached, it might finally start to feel like a friend of creatives again, rather than a heavy handed landlord. Here's hoping...

As you might guess from the name, Messi and the Giants is not an animated biopic charting the young Messi's journey from Rosario to Barcelona, through his treatment for growth hormone deficiency and on to La Liga and then World Cup glory. All the same, few people expected it to be quite as wild as the RPG-inspired story revealed in the trailer below.

Set to stream globally on Disney+ in summer 2027, Messi and the Giants appears to have little to do with Messi beyond its use of his name, vague likeness and ability to kick spherical objects.

A 12-year-old Leo finds himself trapped in an alternate reality ruled by giants. To get home, he must compete in football-like battles using powerful “orbs”. He must also try to reunite the fractured realms of Iko.

Unlike his opponents in these battles, Leo can’t use the world's "code powers" to boost his game. Instead, he has to rely on skill, teamwork and pure grit. That makes the series sound a bit like it could be a human versus AI parable, which could be interesting.

The trailer was unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con Málaga by executive producers Lacey Stanton and Bryan Korn of Sony Pictures Television, director Dan Creteur of Atlantis Animation and Sony Music Vision executive producer Sergi Reitg.

Disney announced its acquisition and distribution of the animated series back in December 2024. Messi himself is listed as an executive producer along with his later father alongside various Sony execs.

Atlantis, a studio based in the Canary Islands that previously worked on Miraculous Ladybug, is doing the animation. The Argentine actor Milo Burgess-Webb provides the voice of Leo, and there's an original theme song from Argentine singer Luck Ra called Vamos, Vamos, Vamos.

The video game concept, action sequences, polished 3D animation style and fantasy aesthetic with glowing powers and anime-influenced action sequences, along with the underdog story angle, could make the series appeal to children who aren't football fans. For now, it seems to have avoided the backlash that often greets celebrity-driven projects. Perhaps celebrity animation works best when it stops being a celebrity cartoon.

• Get Disney+

But Pixar's latest animation quickly takes some unexpected turns, turning into a surreal, psychedelic origin story with a very unexpected animation style.

Pixar bills the seven-minute film Fruit & Nut as the "untold story of the most famous duo of all time". It was directed by Pixar artists Rej Bourdages and Tony Maki, who previously worked on films including Coco, Soul, Inside Out 2, Elio and Hoppers.

They used a handcrafted stop-motion animation with tangible puppets and sets, combined with 2D animation sequences. The result has a quirky indie look that gives Fruit & Nut a very different feel from Pixar's feature films with their 3D CGI animation style. In fact, it's only the second stop-motion film that Pixar has released to date, following the experimental short Self in 2024.

As for the plot, it's a deliberately absurd origin story for a popular snack presented as a Thelma & Louise style road trip adventure. A lonely peanut inadvertently becomes a getaway driver for a bank robbery after picking up a hitchhiking strawberry while making a run from dive bar without paying. They're another surprising twist at the end.

Many of those commenting on the short have highlighted its meme potential along with surprise that Pixar would release an animation with such a boldly different direction.

That's the beauty and value of the studio's internal artist-driven programme, which is intended to give employees freedom to experiment with different styles and techniques – a kind of spiritual successor to the earlier SparkShorts initiative. While the films are shorts only released online, they could help inspire Pixar to consider new directions: it's already expanded its stylistic range with the 2D animation of upcoming Gatto.

That kind of small fix runs through Dear Van Gogh and shows how art lays the foundations for indie games, in a season that turns some of the world's best-known paintings into places you can walk, climb, and fly through, and is available for PS5, Switch, PC, iPhone and Android. Yingxian Lu, Content Producer at thatgamecompany, explains how it came together, from the first brushstroke tests to a finale shared with millions of other players.

Which paintings can be levels?

While something like The Potato Eaters could be troublesome, some Van Gogh paintings are easy to turn into an interactive experience. "If the painting is a natural landscape, it's more straightforward to translate into a 3D environment," says Lu. Van Gogh's output is much wider than landscapes, though: flowers, plants, characters, self-portraits. The team didn't want to drop those, "simply because they were more difficult to translate into the game experience."

Almond Blossoms became an enormous tree in the game, with Sky's avatars around the size of the flowers, free to walk across it. "It feels surreal but also very dreamy and poetic," she says.

The Van Gogh self-portrait needed a different approach. "Having avatars jump across Van Gogh's face obviously didn't feel appropriate," Lu says, so it went into the story. A Van Gogh character paints himself in the game, with a mirror on the canvas. The camera pushes in on the canvas, then pulls back to show the finished portrait.

The people in the paintings became cosmetics, and players can play with aspects of life inside a Van Gogh painting – you can get the postman's hat and suit, and outfits drawn from Fisherman's Wife on the Beach and Peasant Woman Against a Background of Wheat, so they can dress as 19th-century people.

Brushstrokes first, story later

The team looked at the brushstroke system first, before they knew the narrative or gameplay. "The visual identity of the project was so crucial that we wanted to make sure we could achieve the look we were aiming for before committing to the project," Lu says. "And we did!"

She credits the graphics engineers and 3D environment artists with the heavy lifting. Her own job was to help define the visual goal and coordinate the teams around it. The finished tool lets artists adjust the colour, thickness and size of strokes and apply them to the game's 3D models.

The system went through many rounds of iteration, with features added along the way. One is "museum light," added by the graphics engineer, which gives uneven brushstrokes highlights and shadows as they're lit, like a painting in a gallery. Lu says it "creates a much more convincing sense of brushwork and elevates the overall visual quality." Another is a gyro effect, where the highlights move as you move your device. "It's just a really cool feature and something that can only really be experienced in the medium of games," she says.

Asked about the biggest technical limitation the team faced, she gives a short answer: "Honestly, the brushstroke system was the biggest one."

When the painting is the concept art

For most of Sky's content, concept art comes first, then 3D. Here, "the paintings themselves were the concept art, and very much what the 3D environments started from and referenced."

Getting the colours right took some effort. Digital images of the paintings online often didn't agree with each other, so the team had people visit museums in Europe and MoMA in New York to photograph the originals. The concept team used those photos to colour-correct the digital versions, and those became the references for the 3D artists.

The team also researched architecture in the Netherlands and France from the period. For Van Gogh's room in Arles, they found material on the building's structure and rebuilt it as it was. Arles itself needed extra concept work, because the team wanted more than the bedroom, the Yellow House and the café. Concept artists imagined what the buildings and other areas might look like beyond those landmarks, so the town would feel like a place where other people lived.

Lighting needed a rethink too. The bedroom painting is bright and well lit, so the team used more light sources than usual. "We couldn't just look at the painting as a reference for the environment itself," Lu says. "We also had to think about what created the particular atmosphere of the painting, and then figure out how to recreate that atmosphere with the tools and limitations of a real-time game."

Almond Blossoms, and the limits of the tree

Lu says Almond Blossoms is probably the most difficult painting to turn into a level. The early idea was to make the tree huge so players could platform across the branches. Getting it to work took a lot of iteration. "We wanted the experience to be fun, the navigation to feel intuitive, and we wanted the frame to look as close to the painting as possible," she says. The team simplified where they had to, but kept the main branch structure matching the painting.

The quest designer and environment artists worked closely together, and after all that testing, the team reached a conclusion about the top-right branch. They wanted it in the shot, but a second giant tree "would make the composition feel too busy and take away from the poetic quality of the scene." Hence the branch in the sky.

Lu says the team wanted to keep two things true to the source. One was Van Gogh's subjects. His focus on workers and farmers shows "Van Gogh's interests and attention as an artist," she says, which is why the farmer stays in the environment for Le Moulin de la Galette.

The other was the history. Lu worked closely with the design and art teams to keep the experience faithful to the historical material while still feeling interactive and respectful of the real events. "We didn't want to add a character or create a story that would change what actually happened in Van Gogh's life," she says.

That's why players enter the experience "spirit-shaded" rather than as their usual selves. "We wanted to communicate that players are not actually meeting or interacting with Van Gogh. They are stepping into his world and witnessing parts of his life, but they remain separate from the historical events."

The team took liberties with Van Gogh's inner life. Nobody can know exactly what he felt while painting, so they read his letters to his brothers and friends and made their own interpretations from that research.

Sky has very little dialogue, and the team used that limit creatively, telling Vincent's story through symbolism, which Lu says "helps enhance the meaning of an object." In the game, sunflowers represent hope and love, and Theo's island, built as his gallery, has a safe with sunflowers in it. Crows stand for the darker parts of Vincent's life. A crow attack represents the scene of his death by suicide. "This was a heavy incident, and we wanted to approach it in a more abstract way and make it less triggering for our players," she says. The team also wanted to keep things artistic and beautiful, and avoid some overly violent scenes.

Two ways to play Vincent's story

The bigger design problem was how to make the story interactive without altering it. A big part of Lu's role was working with the team to work out how players could take part in Vincent's story without changing historical events. If players just watched, she says, "that would become a movie, not an interactive game." The team settled on two roles: the postman and the brush.

As the postman, players read the letters between Vincent and Theo and feel the emotional and financial support Theo gave. The delivery sequences change with the period of Vincent's life. In Arles, you deliver a letter on a river, a peaceful and beautiful experience meant to evoke the peace and joy of that period. In Saint-Rémy, the delivery happens in a dark space, and players have to go against the wind and find their way out to evoke a harder time.

As the brush, players become the brush in Vincent's hands. They might complete an element of a sketch, colour a painting in from black and white, or turn an ordinary texture into a brushstroke texture. Players are helping him finish the paintings, Lu says, "while still staying true to the history."

The letters

Reading the correspondence surprised the team, even though they already knew Theo backed Vincent. Vincent "really liked writing letters," Lu says, and wasn't shy about asking Theo for money, with lines like "I hope you will be able to send money soon."

Van Gogh is estimated to have written and received more than 2,000 letters, but he wasn't good at keeping them. Many of the surviving ones are from Vincent to Theo, partly because Theo kept them carefully. Only around 40 of Theo's letters to Vincent survive, which makes those especially meaningful to the team. Lu, who has recently become interested in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, says it made her feel Vincent is probably a P type and Theo a J type.

Those few letters are encouraging because Vincent wasn't well recognised in his lifetime, and Theo told him his paintings were beautiful and urged him to keep going. One line stayed with the team: "the courage for work is far from abandoning you." "It's really touching to me and the team as well," Lu says, and the words inspired the finale. An early blockout of the finale worked so well that the team kept its pace and feel until the end of production.

Making Starry Night

Lu names Starry Night as the scene where the translation worked best (perhaps because it's actually more scientifically accurate than we think), and the team saved it for the finale. Players fly into the sky and, along with millions of others, light it up to form the painting. "So you become part of the beauty that you are witnessing," she says.

She credits the visuals, narrative, interaction and music working together, and says the stars and moon look amazing. It's an emotional scene for her. "I tear up for Vincent, such a talented artist who died at such a young age," she says, but she's also glad he had Theo and Johanna, and finds it striking to see so many players there and so many people recognising his work.

"There are so many different emotions wrapped into this masterpiece, Starry Night," she says. "I feel the art and design worked perfectly here."

Lu added two points, starting with production. Sky usually releases seasonal quests gradually, with something new every week or two, and a full season often needs two versions to complete. For Dear Van Gogh, the team delivered everything in a single version for the first time. The idea came from creative director Jenova Chen, and Lu says she believed in it and took ownership of making it work.

The problem was that "our existing workflow wasn't really designed to deliver an entire season within a single version." She worked with the teams to split production into smaller milestones, create more overlap between them and change how resources and dependencies were planned, so more of the experience could be built in parallel. She also tracked the schedule closely to address bottlenecks early. The result was a different way of producing a season, and a more efficient way of managing what she calls "a much more interconnected experience within a tighter timeline."

The team felt the format suited the story. Van Gogh's life is emotional, and they wanted that to flow from one period to the next rather than make players wait two weeks between chapters. Players could take it in one sitting, "almost like watching a movie," or go at their own pace. Lu says most players responded positively, and quest completion was higher than in previous seasons.

Bringing Johanna van Gogh-Bonger to life

Her second addition was about Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo's wife, whom Lu says she knew little about before the project. Theo died roughly six months after Vincent, leaving Johanna to raise their 11-month-old baby alone. She recognised and valued Vincent's work, as Theo had, and spent decades bringing it to the public. She also edited and published the letters between the brothers "so that people living today, like us, can get a glimpse into what the great artist was thinking and feeling back then." "She's one of the reasons we know Vincent van Gogh today," Lu says.

In the game, Johanna stays in the gallery and guides players through the stages of Vincent's life. At the end, players stand with her and witness the success she helped create. "We wanted her to be more than just a historical figure in the background," Lu says.

Lu says Johanna "has really inspired me, and I have so much respect for her," and that she admires her, as a woman herself, for her commitment, for recognising the value of Vincent's work ahead of her time, for her love for her family and for her perseverance. Learning about her, Lu says, showed her "there was another remarkable story behind Van Gogh's legacy, and I'm really glad we were able to bring a little bit of that story into the project."

Children of the Sky: Van Gogh Season is available now for Android, iPhone, Switch, PlayStation and PC (Steam).

“I am passionate about both stylised and realistic art, so I like making stuff of all sorts,” he says. That shows in the four examples he's chosen to share with us to showcase his work, for which he uses Blender, ZBrush and Substance 3D Painter (see our guides to the best 3D modelling software and the best laptops for 3D modelling).

Mermaid reimagined

“For this, I wanted to make my own mermaid design. My approach was mixing real-world references with key elements that make up a mermaid.”

Bubbly

“This little guy is my own design. The idea was to mix a couple of animals and come up with a ‘sidekick-like’ character for an animated feature.”

Metroid Stylised

“A stylised adaptation of Samus from Metroid. I wanted to explore making a suit that fits a human body and therefore could look a bit more functional.”

Realistic Stitch

“My take on one of my favourite characters of all time. It was also a great opportunity to make a complex character and push everything I’d learnt so far.”

You can see more of Juan's work on his ArtStation profile.

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

Today's drawing tablet deals

See our guide to the best drawing tablets for more options.

Creative Bloq is now easier to access than ever before with our on-the-go app, which brings you all the content you know and love from our website, but in a super-streamlined design.
Download the Creative Bloq app for iOS
Download the Creative Bloq app for Android