May 13, 2020

Meet Victor Maury of Riot Games

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Victor Maury.

Victor, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My story starts like many other artists: I’ve been drawing since I could hold a pencil and knew I wanted to be a professional artist since the first time I saw Toy Story and Princess Mononoke. I was born in France and we moved to Austin, Texas when I was seven, where art stayed my principal hobby and identifying feature.

When it came time to apply to college, I mistakenly enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, not yet understanding the distinction between “Contemporary Art” and what you might call “Entertainment Design”, “Illustration”, or “Concept Art”. Most of their advertised animation curriculum didn’t even exist so after a year there I set my sights on CalArts and Ringling and transferred out. I had half a year of downtime between SAIC and Ringling so I started making T-shirt designs for Threadless, which allowed me to buy my first Cintiq (that I still have to this day).

Ringling was much closer to what I had imagined art school would be. I entered as a freshman in their Animation department with a burning desire to prove myself and make up for lost time. I greatly enjoyed my first year doing traditional animation (there is truly nothing like it) but once it was time to start working in Maya in windowless rooms, I hit a big wall. Animation had always been my dream, but the reality of it would require greater sacrifice than I was willing to make. The hours of work were insane, the animation students walked around like stressed soulless zombies from pulling countless all-nighters and were at the mercy of cryptic and capricious software, it felt needlessly competitive and offered little recognition outside of niche circles. It was around this time that I realized that actual human beings painted the art on my favorite cardboard crack: Magic the Gathering.

So I switched to Illustration. This new world suited me much better. You only had to do one drawing instead of 24/second, you could paint outside (!!), and you could even attain some amount of popularity in the larger world, a la James Jean or Moebius. My sights were set on Wizards of the Coast the entire time, even knowing the pay wouldn’t be great. I calculated the minimum I would need to make to scape by and paint Goblins and Dragons to my heart’s content.

As fortune would have it, my roommate, friend, and artistic rival at the time was an avid player of a game called League of Legends. Our Sophomore summer, while I was taking supplementary classes at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, I visited him during his internship at Riot Games, a loud, scrappy, energetic studio in Santa Monica. Though the look of the game back then was abhorrent, they were hiring tons of heavy-hitting art superstars to bring League into the modern age. The new style was going to be pretty cool: high-level fantasy illustration but still somewhat stylized, which appealed to my animation roots in a time when Magic was becoming more and more photo-real and “serious”. The people there were irreverent gamers and looked to be having quite a bit of fun.

The following summer I applied for an internship there as well and was accepted. I continued to do art tests for them throughout my senior year, with plans of joining the team full time after college. I did get to live out my dream of working at Wizards when I was offered to do a three weeks concept push for a Dungeons & Dragons expansion (Tomb of Annihilation), an experience which remains very dear to my heart. I then flew down directly from Washington to California and began my life in LA.

I spent about three years as a “Splash Artist”, producing hi-res images of the game’s iconic characters, and now I work as a concept artist on Arcane, Riot’s newly announced animated TV show. It has been my favorite gig to date!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
My struggles were not logistical ones like I hear some of my peers talk about. I always had a very supportive family, the means to pursue prohibitively expensive secondary education, and I seemed to learn things relatively quickly and effortlessly.

Instead, my greatest obstacles were my own demons, be they doubt, fear, pride, or depression. Whatever powers I was granted by my single-minded focus on my goal of becoming a successful artist, they came with the (now obvious) pitfalls of neglecting other aspects of life such as diet, exercise, and mental health. I experienced high highs and low lows almost every single day, alternating rapidly between thinking I was either a genius or a fraud. I wrestled with jealousy, comparing myself incessantly to others. I managed to be at once extremely self-deprecating and arrogant. I seemed highly successful on the outside, but this was a feeble facade hiding the extremely fragile ego of someone who had never known real confidence. I lived with a vicious and venomous voice in my head that filled me with nothing but dark thoughts and made me appear outwardly negative from the time I was ~13 until well into my early 20s.

Liberation from this seemingly interminable depression remains the greatest victory I have ever experienced. Shoutouts to mindfulness, good friends, and doing the work necessary to change.

Please tell us about Riot Games.
Most of my time at Riot was on the “Splash Art” team. The principal mission of this team was to create immersive, aspirational, and iconic depictions of the “champions” that populate the game. These illustrations are like the movie poster, or beauty shot, or storytelling image that best captures the essence and design of the characters. Given that these characters appear approximately the size of a dime in-game, having a vivid, detailed, cinematic illustration of the character to refer to can help project a deeper fantasy onto the player’s imagination. This is pretty in line with the idea of imaginative realism in general: depict that which does not exist in a convincing way.

I looked up to all the artists on this team for all their various strengths mindbending skills, but I always prided myself on achieving the right emotional tone and playing up the uniqueness of each character in my work. That and really nailing the portraits.

I now work as a concept artist on the animated series Arcane, which means I’m in charge of designing anything and everything that ends up on screen, like characters and props, but also thinking about larger systems, like fashion, architecture, religion, magic, technology, etc.

Designing is a new and humbling challenge for me after years of focusing primarily on illustration!

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I was very introverted as a child (less so now) and always living in my imagination. I have tremendously fond memories of going to the mountains and making movies in my head. Sometimes a mountain would get up and walk away, awakening from its slumber. Other times, I would picture the intricacies of court life in the ant colonies hidden under the roots and moss. I couldn’t stop imagining kingdoms in the clouds (imagine my delight when I finally saw Castle in the Sky). The play of scale between the microscopic and the panoramic was intoxicating.

Contact Info:

Website: victormaury.com
Instagram: instagram.com/moulinbleu

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