Do you have any words of wisdom for people who are wanting to keep their own identity, their own style, but still work as a concept artist?

Usually what impresses people when you're trying to get a job is just purely a lot of draftsmanship. Raw skill is what impresses people to get a job. Once you get that, it's not hard to necessarily get a job as a concept artist.

If you want to stand out as a concept artist that is really designing things for not just for the audience, but for yourself, if you want to say something with your characters, you can't depend on other people to define your work. If you join a studio, you're going to be working with a team of people, and those people are going to have opinions and they're going to partially shape what you're doing because you're working in a team. So if you really want to like have your idea, clarity of vision, you really have to have a strong vision yourself, and then have a team that can get behind it; they have to be able to support you. And that's hard, that comes with luck.

I was very lucky to find Motiga, they gave me a lot of freedom. Finding the right studio is important. If you work for a very large studio, they are driven by a lot of different assets, like money and audience. When something's global, then you have to appeal to a global audience. You have to appeal to people in Asia, you have to appeal to people in Europe. And all these kind of different voices are going to inform your opinion. So if you want to stay true to yourself and stay true to the characters you want to design, you have to make sure it's on a project that is at the scale that you're comfortable at, and is at a level of feedback that you're comfortable with so that you really get your ideas across and that they actually come across the way that you want them to. And that goes for anybody, for film and television and video, and video games--basically the whole entertainment industry. If you want a vision that is unique, you have to either find a smaller team that is willing to take more risks, or find a large studio that really trusts you.