Julian Calle Interview - His creative process and motivations

Julian Calle talks about his work on for the cover of the Egypt Photo Pack

Egypt Concept Pack is here!

Aimed at concept artists, this pack is a a collection of older images from Egypt. These shots are older than most of our gallery images and have a retro character to them. Most of the images are lower resolution than what we typically provide so we’re releasing this pack for only 100 credits.

Download the Egypt Concept Pack

Interview with Julián Calle

Julian is a concept artist at Image Engine, Vancouver. His recent work includes Thor, Lost In Space and Fantastic Beasts.

What is the story being told in your cover art?

When I did this concept I was thinking how to create one beautiful image and try to find a beautiful mood and to focus on creating an image for video games. It’s mostly about creating the mood and not so much the buildings and textures. I was focused on reproducing this one time of the day and the feel of sunset in Egypt.

You can see in the center of the image I have focused hot and warm colours and contrasted with the blue and cold colours to the side which created this mood I liked.

…It’s mostly about creating the mood and not so much the buildings and textures

How did you come up with that? What inspired you?

I’m a big fan of the history, especially the Egypt history. I love this culture. I love the last Assassin’s Creed video game in Egypt too. I was one of my favourites and it shows the origins of the story in Assassin’s Creed and in this epic time of Egyptian culture. This was my motivation and inspiration here.

What was your approach to creating this image?

I didn’t use any 3D models for this, it was all 2D. I cut little pieces of different images and buildings and cut and paste over and over to try to find an interesting composition and layouts for the buildings.

I completed the layout and then blended the images. Then over this layer I use the overlay blending and paint black and white colour. Black colour for the shadows and white colour for the highlights and that’s how I create this variation between the buildings, the light and the shadows.

What Software did you use?

Only Photoshop.

What did you think about working with this pack?

This pack provided everything I need for this image. The resolution of the images was not a problem because I created the photobash and focused more on the shape of the buildings and then started to paint over.

This pack provided everything I need for this image.

This is the reason for the final result, I have painted over a lot with my brushes and you can see this in some areas. I use some other images for the textures on walls and water reflections and the sky and I just take the colours for blending on overlay.

Checkout the Egypt Concept Pack

I love working with images of MattePaint.com because I have different options, sizes, variety, so that is very handy to me.
When I am working in production, if I make a concept from MattePaint there is always a high resolution image available for the production so the matte painters can create the final shots with the same photos.

Why do you make art?

Okay… I’m big fan of Star Wars. Basically, when i was kid, it was exactly 23 years ago, my Grandmother, she live with us and at these days my grandmother suffered a terrible Cancer. 3 weeks before she passed away, I was playing with my clay in her bed and I did a little star wars clone trooper. I remember my grandmother say

“hey, you’re really good with this, maybe you can do this for your life” ~ Grandma Julian ♥

You know, I remember this moment and both my mother and my Grandmother saying “yeah you can do this” — My Grandma was a farmer all her life. She never saw the star wars films or other movies like it. But she was the first person who could see my future.

It was on this day I made my decision, I said