Interview

ARTIST PORTFOLIO

The German illustrator tells Gary Evans how her success in the video games industry has taken time and patience

Jennifer Wuestling was still a student in Germany when she got an interview for a dream job at Riot Games in Los Angeles. This was 2014. She was in her in final year studying design and visual communication at Pforzheim University. She had some experience in entertainment art – she’d recently worked at a Berlin concept art studio as an intern. As well as wanting to talk to her, Riot Games set Jennifer an art task.

Tests like these, you’re given a deadline and certain guidelines. It’s a chance to show what you can do, how you’d handle the pressure of working at a big games company. Jennifer was also working on her bachelor thesis. The art test quickly stressed her out, and she failed.

“I was so happy about the opportunity,” the German says, “that I took it on right away, and got pretty stressed. In hindsight, if I had waited a few months and finished my degree, I would have had a more relaxed and methodical approach to the test. The timing wasn’t perfect.”

SUZELIA

“A collaboration with @maxwyn_art on Instagram. It’s my version of their character – I liked simplifying the shapes and focusing on colour contrasts.” 

TIME TO DRAW

Jennifer grew up in a small town in the northern Black Forest region of Germany – best known, she says, for cuckoo clocks and Black Forest gateau. There was a lot of climbing trees and riding her bike. At home, she played the latest computer games – her father’s hobby. Her mother’s Spanish and so Jennifer grew up bilingual. This combination of old and new, nature and video games, and the feeling of being between two cultures… it got Jennifer’s imagination going. She was always drawing and making stories up.

“I was so happy about the opportunity that I took it on right away, and got pretty stressed…”

As a teenager, Jennifer was really into manga, liked the line art (“simple, expressive”). First she traced from her manga books, then she created her own characters. She got involved with manga and anime forums, and that led into digital art. She remembers clearly how fun it was to try a graphics tablet for the first time. Digital art offered “endless possibilities.”