ENTER TEXT There was phone call, a job offer, and suddenly Mancini was living in California, working for Blizzard. Just like that, his dream job was suddenly a reality. "I've been over in the States for a bit over three years now, though it doesn't feel like it. It's been fantastic." Mancini is now a fully-fledged member of the Blizzard art team, working primarily as a concept artist and illustrator. He outlined how the workflow might occur on a typical day. "Sometimes the design team will come along with a strong idea of what they want. Like, they might have a new StarCraft unit, and they'll know they want it do perform a specific function, so we'll then sketch things based on that." "I've been doing lots of work on campaign stuff, though. They might have a jungle planet, and they'll say, okay, we need aliens that look like they'd live in a jungle, so I'd sit down and do a whole bunch of illustrations. We have a lot of leeway when we're doing that kind of environmental stuff." While Mancini's true love is art and illustration, his academic background lies in graphic design. "When I finished high school I didn't really know what I wanted to do; I only knew I wanted to do something art-related, so I applied for some design degrees, as well as a game art course at RMIT," he told me. "I decided that the graphic design degree was a bit broader, so if I came out at the end of that, I could still go and do something else, whereas the game art degree was a lot narrower."

ENTER TEXT "It was not 100% relevant to what I'm doing now, but I really enjoyed the course. I wasn't too stressed and I could take some time out doing my fan art on the side," he recalled. "I could just spend time developing my skills, plus I think there's a lot to be said for the design sensibilities I picked up during that course. A lot of it is about ways of thinking, so while the typography and layout design I did isn't really relevant to my job, when I'm doing an illustration, it helps me with my design, layout, and composition." While he is now almost exclusive a digital artist, Mancini spent many years honing his skills with physical media. "I still love just drawing with pencils - even at work I'll do thumbnails in pencil. I'll also still work sometimes in coloured pencils, watercolours, and acrylics," he said. "I'll tend to bring out the acrylics or watercolours when I want to paint something as a gift for someone - it's nice to have something tangible to give them." ENTER TEXT "I got into digital art when we got our first computer and an old version of Illustrator and Photoshop in 2000, so I started using it for my art. At work these days it's all Photoshop and I draw with a Cintiq that I've used for about a year, that lets you draw directly onto a screen, but I grew up using a Wacom tablet, and I still use that because I don't have a Cintiq at home yet."

What was once a spare time hobby is now a full-time job, and Mancini still loves drawing Zerg. "They're just fun to draw," he said. "There's something really fun about getting into all of that fine organic detail. It was a great coincidence that the expansion I happened to do most of my work on is the Zerg expansion, Heart of the Swarm. It's going to be fun, actually, getting into Legacy of the Void, because I really haven't done very much Protoss stuff, so that's going to be great to get stuck into that." Once just a fan, Luke Mancini is now working his dream job at Blizzard. It's not all StarCraft, though. Mancini has also been making a name for himself creating fantasy art for the World of Warcraft trading card game. "Doing that art is a heap of fun, because I don't work with the WoW team apart from that," he explained. "It's a nice change of pace, because I really do like the fantasy stuff as well. I'll be working on StarCraft which is all sci-fi, and then once every couple of months I'll get to do one of the cards for the game on the side. It's nice to sink my teeth into something a little bit different." As for the future, Mancini is happy to stay right where he is. "I have my dream job already," he said with a laugh. "I'm not even beginning to think about what I'll be moving on to next." - James "DexX" Dominguez

DexX is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez

