THE ART OF THE LAST OF US PART II

One Pixel Brush’s Shaddy Safadi reveals what it takes to create art for this year’s most anticipated video game…

- Shaddy Safadi

How to find the juice? That’s much more ambiguous,” teases art director Shaddy Safadi as he narrows his eyes and rubs his fingers across his thumbs. What’s this mysterious ‘juice’? It’s that special something that raises concept art up a notch, and in The Last Of Us Part II became important to depicting the game’s “beautiful decay”.

Shaddy is art director of his own studio, One Pixel Brush, but spent more than a decade working at Naughty Dog on the PlayStation title Jak 3 before moving on to the multimillion-selling Uncharted series, and the original The Last Of Us. For its sequel, Shaddy’s team of “superstar artists” were recruited to help with production. He thought this would be the normal 10 concept paintings, but this rose to a staggering 900. Four years later Shaddy can share the process.

LOOK FOR BEAUTY

Continuing on the idea of “beautiful decay”, Shaddy reveals that this was an idea coined by art director Bruce Straley for the original game to convey humanity huddled in the shadows, out of sight of a zombie outbreak, while nature reclaims our world.

“Beautiful decay became our benchmark back when I first started, which meant when you paint the greenery, when you depict the way that trees grow over things, you can make it pretty. And that’s gonna be a nice contrast to the horror of what the game is,” explains Shaddy.