PASCAL BLANCHÉ

Beren Neale speaks to the artist with a colourful career in games, and an even more colourful body of work

- Beren Neale

Over the years of working on ImagineFX, it’s exciting when you discover an artist who you can identify by their style alone – whether that’s the ultra-detailed fantasy portraits of Dave Rapoza, the gleaming surfaces in Serge Birault’s pin-up art, or the Old Master depth and weight of Craig Mullins. Pascal Blanche, with his distinct, colour-rich sci-fi scenes that seem to sit in their very own dimension, is one of those artists. His use of 3D modelling, his otherworld subject matter, and of course that striking use of colour, makes you feel that any piece that he posts online could only have been made by him.

CLASSIC SCI-FI ART

Of course, for the French-born artist who now resides in the digital art hub that is Montreal, Canada, he’d tell you he’s simply paying homage to a distant age of classic sci-fi art and its practitioners, and that initially, colour was the furthest thing from his mind.

“First, I was a real crappy painter,” he says. “I mean oils and acrylics… I never managed to understand how to deal with them, so it took me a long time to even think about colour in my work.” So where did all these reds and yellows, oranges and greens come from? “I guess I first observed it in artists like Frazetta, Otomo, Druillet, Moebius, Bisley… they all share the same colouring technics in a way: lots of contrasted colours and also very brightly coloured shadows.”