Your Community. Your Report.

This feature will display a monthly interview with the best skinners the community has to offer!

Our second Skin Artist Spotlight was conducted with Crestfall. This guy is well known and respected for his talented work in his “Raven” skin series, a theme that brings out the darker side of our favorite champions.  He has been an active member of the LoL skinning community since the beta nearly two years ago, and continues with his fantastic work still. Here’s the Q&A interview:

LoLReport:Please give us a brief bio, where you are from and how you started in this field?
Crestfall: I’m 19 at the moment, and I’m studying Computer Science in Cluj, Romania.
I started skinning about two months after I began playing League of Legends, when I found out that a modding community existed for the game.
My first skin, which was a retexture for Katarina, received positive reviews in general, and so I decided to continue improving myself; I’d always wanted to design game characters, but League of Legends is the first game I found easy enough to start with. Notably, there was no easy way to implement any new character
models, so I felt like I could technically do as much as could be done. At the start, I recall it was very gratifying to see even a retextured character ingame.
Another thing that really motivated me at the start is that I had long wanted to learn how to draw, and I figured it’d be much easier to make 3D models (it’s a lot
easier to tell if something’s out of place, and how to fix it), take screenshots of them, and then draw over them. That’s also how I’ve been producing my wallpapers
in the past few months, with the Raven Ahri wallpaper being the most detailed result of that effort so far.

Crestfall: Growing up, I tried my hand at quite a few artistic fields. Chronologically, of the ones I still stick to, music is my first passion, writing is the second, and I discovered graphic design during my early teens.
Back then, I was playing a browser MMO called DarkThrone, and it had several active forum communities, and, as with all active forum communities, everyone wanted snazzy signatures and avatars.
The graphic team that was handling that work for one of the alliances I was in recruited anyone with an interest and offered lots of constructive criticism, so I learned the basics there.
Following that, I had met a charming girl in the same game with who I frequently competed in designs for the better part of a year, until I admitted defeat. Even though I gave up, I learned lots of advanced techniques, most of which use when working with new designs.

This feature will display a monthly interview with the best skinners the community has to offer!

The first Skin Artist Spotlight was conducted with KradisZ, one of the most well known and respected custom skinners in the community. Here’s the Q&A interview:

LoLReport: Please give us a brief bio, where you are from and how you started in this field?

KradisZ: I’m from Canada, BC, I have always been playing games since the age of 5 from the NES to the SNES to the N64 and PSX eras, onwards to the Dreamcast and GameCube and eventually on to the PS2 and finally the PS3. How I started in this field long story short is that post highschool I was a bit lost, went to a college for a term dropped out friend told me to go to art school with him, went with him started getting high marks and passion for all the games I always played with when I was a child. Played League of Legends since the beta was looking for work after graduation, was about to be hired as an animator, the interview went up in a puff of smoke thanks to the economy hitting a recession in 2008. Started working freelance, friend on mumble server was like hey there’s custom skins for LoL check it out. It’s at leaguecraft.com, and I quote what he said was “Hahaha look there’s even a nude Evelynn skin”. I said “Haha what the hell? Oh you can make custom skins. :O.. hmm”. He said “yeah man you should take a shot at it you’ve been working on your demo reel here and there over and over just give your self the challenge of what League of Legends does”. So I took him up on it and basically challenged myself to make a few skins such as the corrupted rune akali, then the night shade katarina one, and finally I timed myself for the starcraft ghost ashe one, 2 weeks, just like League of Legends new champ, all I did was remodel, re-texture, recreate particles, make loadscreens, make alternate texture swaps, alternate loadscreens, video record game play, test the champion, all by myself. When completed my friend said I over killed it because he said I literally became the company since I did every role available to creating the asset other than import/export which was utilizing community tools made available. And that is how I started in this field. P.S. due to popular demand I will be making that SC Skin for Caitlyn, I originally wasn’t going to because I got tired of all the angry comments at how I broke someone’s LoL because Riot decided to update their game which made all ppl who had custom skins not playable on LoL anymore. That is completely NOT my fault as pre-warned by Riot themselves and by my own instruction notes saying that if it breaks your game whatsoever I claim no responsibility, I give the instructions as of how it works and how to install of the date that is stamped on there. Any day past that date and not work is not my fault. I’m doing it for free I don’t get paid to make these nor am I seeking any payment.

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