Artist Research

Sam Didier
Most Famous for his Major work on Warcraft.

Sam "Samwise" Didier is the lead art director at Blizzard Entertainment. Among the veteran Blizzard employees, Samwise Didier has been a consistent artist for many years, and recently his style has been the artistic direction of choice for all Blizzard franchises from the past and present.

Didier's greatly exaggerated physiques and vibrant, bright color palette has dictated the artistic style of Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, and even the now defunct StarCraft: Ghost. Didier has also designed and drawn many of the graphical icons found in Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, and even provided some voicework for both.

Just by looking at the home page of the site "Sons of the Storm" that Sam Didier created, you can tell the amount of effort and detail he puts into his unique semetrical and orderly style of drawings. He has also managed to keep to the Quest style of layout very well, which keeps to the genre of Role playing games.

I picked this piece by Didier as one of my favourites of all his works. He has done an amazing job at showing the power and speed of both the dragon and the hero. I think the emotion he has managed to put across on the faces of both is amazing, it really gives the viewer a sense of how the hero would of felt in that one situation.

I picked this sketch done by Didier for Warcraft because i think it may well show how he develops his ideas from scratch. If you look closely i think you could just make out where he has started off by making a rough dark shape of a figure. I think he then sketches a general figure based upon the dark figure and gradually adds detail and changes slight things to fit the style he is looking for. Once the full sketch is done he either fills in the gaps with shading in black and white or adds colour.


I found an interview where Sam Didier was asked "So tell us what your job is in regards to Starcraft."
In my opinion his reply gives a great insight into what goes on behind the scenes of a game being designed.

"I am the art director on the game. Back when we started, I was providing a lot of concepts, working on models and textures and all that. Now the bulk of the art is on its way to being done. There are still things that we need to hit up, but a lot of it now is just sort of overseeing, making sure that anything new that has been generated has that kind of Starcraft feel or it looks enough Zerg, it looks enough Protoss, that sort of thing."

Info From : http://www.wowwiki.com/Samwise_Didier
Interview From : http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/31/blizzard-interview-samwise-didier-talks-starcraft-2/