Concept Artists / Illustrators

• Yoshitaka Amano

Yoshitaka Amano was born on March 26th 1952 and is a well known name among video game fans. He, himself, considers Final Fantasy to be the series that made him as famous as he is. He was once in charge of the character designs for a number of the early Final Fantasy games in the franchise. He has since stepped back slightly, these days working on the different logos and promotional artwork and illustrations for the newer games.

When designing the logos for the games in the franchise, Amano is given limited information to work with. As the logo is set around the central concept of the game, specific and important aspects of the game aren't required when creating the logo for the game. Amano is given text-based information about the general concept and, from that, he creates the logo. 

Concept pieces for the Final Fantasy I & III Logos

These are some of Amano's concept designs of the logos for Final Fantasy I and III. These show different potential ideas he had whilst designing. I really like this sketch piece, as it showcases the different ideas that were thought up while being created. It's very nice to be able to see how something started off and what it ultimately ended up looking like.

• Akira Amano 

Akira Amano was born in 1973 and is most well known for her work creating the manga series Katekyō Hitman Reborn!, which became a hit manga series in both Japan and ran for 411 chapters that were compiled into 42 volumes between 2004 and 2012. It was published in the Shōnen Jump magazine and became a hit, later being made into an anime series that consisted of 203 episodes.

In the same year that Reborn! finished, 2012, Amano took on another project as the character designer for an anime original series called Psycho-Pass. While was an anime original series to begin with, it later branched off into a manga series; however, this manga adaptation had a different manga artist. More recently, a visual novel style game was released that was set during the original anime season.

This is one of the pieces of concept art for one of the characters in Psycho-Pass. I particularly like this piece, as it shows the different outfits that were considered before the character, as well as giving off pieces of base personality just based on the poses that the character was drawn in.

References:

Juba, J. (2016). The Art That Shaped Final Fantasy: Thoughts From Famed Artist Yoshitaka Amano. Available: 
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2016/04/27/the-art-that-shaped-final-fantasy-thoughts-from-famed-artist-yoshitaka-amano.aspx. Last accessed 2nd June 2016.

Regniez, M. (2002). Video Games. Available: 
http://yoshitaka-amano.kouryu.info/genre_eng-jeux.html. Last accessed 27th May 2016.

Plunkett, L. (2012). The Beautiful Final Fantasy Art of Yoshitaka Amano. Available: 
http://kotaku.com/5917619/the-beautiful-final-fantasy-art-of-yoshitaka-amano. Last accessed 27th May 2016.