rAge 2020: Roxy’s re-re-re-boot

Since her debut at rAge 2010, Roxy has been the face of the expo and the South African video game scene. She’s an intrepid, independent woman, whose hair colour comes out of a box and she won’t even make excuses for it. She loves spandex and laser guns and interstellar travel. She’s hard-core but she’s also fun, and she probably quit Dark Souls because she doesn’t have to prove herself and she prefers sci-fi and management games, anyway.

For rAge Digital, we decided it was time for Roxy to mix things up. She’s trendy and fashionable like that, and besides, her cyborg implants were kind of starting to itch. So, we commissioned local artist Stephen Spinas to revamp her aesthetic with some new contemporary glam. Practical but casual. Subtle but glamorous. Feminine but also not too feminine, because Roxy isn’t super concerned about gender norms and stereotypes but feminine enough because that’s her choice, OK.

Roxy isn’t ready to go public with her makeover just yet (soon!), but in the meantime, we talked to Stephen about her redesign.

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR ARTISTIC INSPIRATIONS AND REFERENCES FOR THE NEW ROXY DESIGN?

So many great artists guide my hand, some of them on a daily basis and then a wider scope for the Roxy piece. Day-to-day, I’m heavily influenced by Bernie Wrightson, Riccardo Federici, Jim Lee, and Seung Eun Kim, who are all fantastic artists whose love for tiny details I am constantly emulating in my work. For Roxy, I’m pulling  a lot of influence from the likes of HR Giger, Stanley “Artgerm” Lau, and J Scott Campbell, as well as style influences from game splashes like League of Legends.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROCESS FROM CONCEPT TO FINAL DESIGN ...

After brainstorming, my drawing process always starts in red – I build up my fundamentals and structure with a red (digital) pencil. This process always takes the longest for me, as I draw and redraw over and over again until I find the shapes that please me. Once I have those lines set, I’ll go back and erase and clean them up. I hate losing the details and playful nature of the sketch, so because of this I have various ways of working once my sketch is complete.

I’ll either go in again and redraw the entire image, cleaning up the lines to get a very crisp final line, or I’ll go back to the sketch layer and erase and clean up further on the sketch itself, erasing lines that are unnecessary and adding details, until I have a much cleaner version of the original. I honestly prefer this technique, as I personally enjoy the sporadic nature of the sketch lines and it’s much more attuned to my process when it comes to traditional art.

Once the lines are down, it comes to colours and lighting, and finally I’ll add in other effects to finish the piece. I usually end up taking the image into Photoshop from Sketchbook so that I can slightly adjust levels and colour variations. Every piece is a bit of a learning experience so I love to experiment and alter my process with every piece. This allows me to add new techniques to my arsenal and also remove those that are no longer viable.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO THIS AS A CAREER?

As far as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in art. Generic answer, I know, but it’s the truth. When I was in preschool, I told my parents that I wanted to be a cartoonist and draw comics and work for Disney. That was the dream for the majority of my life and I spent a significant amount of my time with pen and pencil in hand trying to reach my goal – and though the end goal may only have slightly adjusted, some 25+ years later my dreams are still cut from the same cloth. I now work full time as a “freelance” illustrator.

Regarding projects I'm now working on, I’ve recently been announced as one of the Writers and Illustrators of the Future contest winners for this quarter. This means in April next year I’ll be flown to Hollywood to attend a gala ceremony and prize-giving, where one of the finalists will be announced as the overall winner in each category. Those works will make up an anthology of sci-fi and fantasy stories. I’m also working on artwork for an anthology that’s coming out early next year called Write Like Hell, which is published by Sentinel Creatives, an indie press company started by two of my close friends and myself. We released the third instalment less than a month ago, and it’s available on Amazon.

YOU’RE ALSO WORKING ON A COMIC BOOK?

I am indeed working on a comic book, titled Em is for Monsters. The elevator pitch is that monsters exist, and only children can see them. It follows the protagonist Emily (Em), a young girl runaway who, through one or more series of unfortunate events, finds herself thrust unwillingly into the world of monsters, demons, and other nasty beasts that hide in plain sight. Imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Kickass, but with the violence and twisted nature of the Hellraiser series.

Though I’ve created and written out the story, the actual final words that meet the page will be written by my close friend and business partner at Sentinel Creatives, Mitchell Lüthi. It’s a passion project of mine, and a very slow process as I am pouring all of my love into it. I’m hoping to take some time off to concentrate on finishing the first issue as soon as my current projects are completed.

This article was brought to you by NAG