Art Team Introduction

In the recent development updates we’ve described how the art team is working on improving the battle layer’s visuals, while the campaign layer infrastructure and systems are being built. As the Corps has gone through reorganization recently, it’s a good time to introduce the expanded art team.

Peter Lebek was our in-house artist since the early days of The Civil War development. This spring, after nearly 10 years of meritorious work on Grand Tactician, he decided to pursue other ambitions in his life, so recruiting new muscle to continue his work on the Napoleonic Wars art was needed. At that point we also decided to expand the team, as the amount and quality of required artwork was growing.

The graphics team now consists of five artists, experts in the different fields of 2D and 3D art – a few of them actual engineers, which suits the Corps nicely. Their work is already seen in the recent updates. Here’s who they are, in order of appearance:

Wasel Arar is the Corps’ most senior member, our own old guard, and has been working with the Corps since the Civil War, to which he created many of the visual elements, such as the hand drawn papermaps and colorized photos. He also recorded the game’s soundtrack with his band Wasel & The Weasels. In Napoleonic Wars he was already working on the papermap graphics, but he has also taken over the role of the UI artist, which work can already be seen in the latest dev blog video. He has a long history in visual design, reenactment and music:

“I've been a graphics nerd since 1980 when I wrote my own graphics program to draw pictures on a ZX-80, and I used to be able to draw pictures by typing hex live. I had a summer job at the Finnish Telegraph, so I learned to read telegram ticker tape which is 5-bit Baudot code, so hex was easy. After high school in 1981, I established my first company – one of the first computer game import businesses in Finland. At the same time I started with CorelDraw and became a Photoshop nerd since version 1.07. I moved to Macs because the graphics software was more advanced then. My work has seen early DTP, imagesetting, slide printing, vector graphics, Powerpoint, multimedia CD interface design, logo and brand asset design, print media and early websites. More recently my work has been mostly web design, brand assets, asset management, lots of photoshopping, commissioned work for advertising agencies... I have a huge interest in historical maps, typography, etc. In short: computer graphics in all formats, pixels or vectors, that's what I do.

On the other side is historical reenactment since early 2000: vikings, medieval, 1700-1800s Swedish (Finnish) infantry, American west and civil war. I also created a larp/reenactment game for the American old west. I've been to Waterloo and Leipzig battle reenactments as a drummer with 6000+ musketeers, 300+ cannons, 100+ cavalry, and immense military reenactment camps, which is extremely immersive!

I’ve been playing music for 40+ years, my specialty is early American old time, bluegrass, and also some medieval and folk music styles including fife & drum of course. This includes lots of music events and festival organising.”

Antti Laiho joined the team last year, first to assist with coding, then expanding to the visual side as well. He is something of a “general-plane” as Finns would say. For the visual part, he has been working on lighting, environment, weather and post processing, which can already be seen for example in this video, along with Ilari’s horizon textures.

“My background is in Media Engineering. So yes, I'm an engineer, but most of the time I'm treated as a normal human being. I started my first company in 2007, but my fulltime day job since has been educating game and software engineers in university. I have been teaching a lot of things from 3D-graphics to web development and also a lot of different game development courses mainly using Unity. I was not supposed to be a programmer, but somehow I ended up doing quite a bit of programming and experimenting with different technologies.

Today, I'm the head of degree in our university in Finland and I'm responsible for around 500 students for their future studies. As my hobby I design board games, but most of my time goes to work & family.”

Nicholas Bachand from the Eastern Townships in Canada joined the team this spring, with focus on the historical 2D graphics assets seen in the game’s UI, such as soldier and commander portraits, weapons, as well as the uniform textures for the 3D soldiers:

“I think it’s safe to say I'm pretty passionate about history and uniforms (specialising in napoleonic uniforms); I think I was mostly drawn to uniformology (and consequently history) by the art of the late 19th century. Growing up I was inspired by the paintings of Ernest Meissonier, Edouard Detaille, Alphonse de Neuville (to name but a few!) and also of modern artists such as Keith Rocco [whose work is also used in the game!] and Don Troiani. This pushed me to study History and Classics at the Université de Montréal which led to a semester of archeology In Greece. During and after my university studies, I also studied classical drawing, painting and landscape at the Académie des Beaux-arts de Montréal.

Since 2024, I have been pursuing a career in Fine Art while building up a portfolio of works mostly in oils, but also in gouache and digitally.”

Matias Seikola is the team’s new 3D artist. He started with updating and expanding the soldier model roster and animations, working closely with Nicholas. Some of this cooperation can be seen in a recent video, though only for infantry so far.

“I'm a 3D generalist and my specialties are 3D animation and rigging. I used to be an energy and environmental engineer. But, when I lost my first job after graduation because of the COVID pandemic, I decided that I wanted to change my career and make games instead. One of my hobbies is tabletop wargaming and I have been making a French napoleonic army. It was on hold for a while as I was focusing on 3D art, but after joining this project it made me want to start painting miniatures again.”

Ilari Siltala is the most recent recruit in the Corps. He brings expertise in creating the game’s environments, working currently on 2D terrain and horizon textures. As you have probably noticed, all the released images and videos take place in the summer. This is about to change in the future, with addition of season specific textures, among other things.

“I'm also somewhat of a 3D generalist, but I specialize in environment art and hard surface modeling. Texturing is also a major part of my work as a 3D artist, so it's great to start working on the visuals of GT: NW by creating new textures. I've always enjoyed projects that require historical accuracy, and this one is no exception.”

(Early Development) Images: how the visuals are built by the art team, who does what:

Engineer Corps Marches On

Mon Général, as you can see, the Engineer Corps is reinforced and moving forward with the development, on multiple lines of operations. As always with organization changes, there is a period of learning and getting accustomed to working within the new organization and the new co-workers. As development progresses, you will see a lot more from the art team. Like with other topics, we aim high with historical accuracy of the period, and we really hope you like what you see, and will see in the future!

Cheers,

Grand Engineer Corps