Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational women from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Aurora Georges, Concept Artist at Tap4fun. She speaks about the differences in digital and analogue drawing and where she finds inspiration as an artist. Read more about Aurora in this interview:

Hi Aurora! Could you give us some insights into the day-to-day work in your current role at Tap4fun?

Hey, thanks for having me! Right now I’m still working from home as I haven’t moved to Barcelona yet. The day always starts with a quick stand-up in the morning, via a video call to inform each other what we’re currently working on.

My job is to work on creating characters for a new mobile game we’re making, but since it’s not released yet I can’t go much into detail. However, I can say my job involves drawing a lot of concepts to make sure we find the right direction for each character. There’s a lot of communication between me and the art director, and my daily tasks vary from finding references, creating concepts, making color palette variations, finalizing each character that I work on and making sure the final concept is easily readable for the 3D artists to model afterwards.

Where do you find inspiration for the artworks you design?

I usually find a lot of inspiration browsing Artstation where I follow a lot of amazing artists, and what usually inspires me the most is seeing the way the artists use colors, get down a certain mood or use their brushstrokes in their art piece. I find it incredibly fascinating how some artists work with really unique art styles and just how differently we all seem to perceive things in this line of work.

I mostly look at artwork containing things like characters, portraits, animals, environment and game art. At the same time I also get very inspired by life in general, especially when I go for walks in nature, listen to music, watch movies, play games and also some life situations where I experience certain strong emotions a bit beside the usual.

What advantages and disadvantages do you see when working with pen and paper versus creating digital drawings?

I definitely started out drawing with pen and paper when I was younger, and some advantages were that it feels really liberating to just grab a piece of paper and start drawing freely without thinking too much. I mostly use it when I want to quickly sketch down some ideas that pop up in my head. On the downside, I don’t like how I don’t have a ctrl+z button (undo a pen stroke) in real life and can erase mistakes as easily as when working digitally. Plus accidentally smudging some pencil strokes or erasing too hard on the paper have always been a small pet peeve for me.

I guess it was one of the reasons I got interested in digital drawing during my teenage years where I could really spend hours and hours working on a piece and make all the details I wanted to do. I really like the “painting feeling” when drawing digitally and I definitely have more control when I draw as I can always tweak things, color correct, zoom, flip the canvas to better see my mistakes, plus all the other advantages Photoshop gives you.

On the other hand, you don’t experience corrupt files and lagging when drawing traditionally. I have also noticed that I have been neglecting doing traditional drawing lately which has made it harder for me to come up with interesting ideas for digital pieces. So I definitely feel like I need a fine balance between doing both traditional and digital drawing to feel like I can express myself the way I want with my art pieces.

Thanks for this interview, Aurora!

Aurora’s links: Website & Portfolio │ Artstation │ Instagram │ LinkedIn

Womenize! – Inspiring Stories Feature by Sophie Brugmann