Artist Spotlight: Héctor Sevilla Luján, aka "elsevilla"

Middara is a multiplayer cooperative storytelling board game on Kickstarter now. The first thing you notice about Middara isn’t the bucket full of miniatures or the intriguing storytelling gameplay concepts but the amazing anime artwork that has been used to bring the concept to life.

These vividly coloured and beautifully detailed pieces of artwork are the product of Héctor Sevilla Luján, more commonly known as elsevilla. This breath-taking imagery brings the characters and story of Middara to life.

I believe that the artists are some of the unsung heroes of table top gaming and so managed to secure a short interview with elsevilla and took it as an opportunity to spotlight his art.

You are the creator of the, quite frankly stunning, artwork for Middara, is this the first board game you have made artwork for?

Not sure if this question is for me, after all I was just part of a creative team, some ideas are mine, but other character designs are from other people, like I said we are a team I can’t take all the credit here.

Are you a table top gaming player, if so what are your favourite games?

I’m a big Dungeons and Dragons fan, it doesn’t matter how good computer graphics are this days, they can’t still beat imagination. Throwing dice and having this complete world inside my mind, was a feeling that videogames these days can’t fill.  

I really loved Ravenloft, a deadly world with evil creatures, was a lot of fun, especially when you fight against a golem.

Is there one game that you wish you had made the artwork for?

Yeah, like I mentioned before, it would had been great to do art for Ravenloft, or anything Dungeons and Dragons related. I still miss the feeling of having a 20 side dice in my hand.

Middara is full of amazing character design, where did the inspiration come from for these characters?

Most of this are from the creative team I work with, and the ones I had created from zero these come from ideas I had seen in daily routine life, or in other games I'm a big fan off. I just mesh them up and glue them together, and some ideas end up looking really good.

What mediums to you use to create your art? Is it all in software or do you also paints or pencils?

Middara was entirely computer, I use coral painter 2015. I really love this software because makes me do stuff I will do with traditional tools, especially the blending. I also like using mechanical pencils, and right now I’m trying to use art pens. My skills on inks aren’t that good but I’m trying to learn.

Walk us through the creation of a typical piece of artwork.

It’s a back and forth all over, sometimes they give me the character design in really detailed pencil sketches, sometimes they let me do some changes, or sometimes they let me just go wild. Then I start working on the computer, and in the middle of the process they do edits, and I fix the characters for the final piece.

Last of all, where can people find more of your work and, if you available for commissions, where can people contact you?

First thank you for this interview, there are moments when you are feeling down, and these kind of notes makes you feel good once more, thank you for taking your time in this interview like I said before it was an honour. I have many places, like Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, deviant art and many more; you can find all those links on my website www.elsevilla.net

Again thank you for this interview, and I hope to see young kids playing these kind of games once more, these games that helped me to create stories and characters inside my mind, and were a big help to be a creative person later on. It’s like reading books, you develop your imagination. Thank you and have a great day guys.

A big thank you to elsevilla for taking the time to answer my questions, I know that English isn’t his first language so these kind of interviews can be tricky.

To check out more of elsavilla’s amazing Middara artwork go check out the Middara Kickstarter.