Your local psychedelic freak. Happy to meet you, I'm Nik!
Your local psychedelic freak.
Happy to meet you, I’m Nik! I’m a comic artist, animator, designer and editor with an emotive, punchy, and psychedelic flair, illustrating both digitally and with pen on paper. I’m bigender(He/She).
I’m all about character design, character interpretation, and storyline ideas. I love placing special emphasis on characters and the way they’re created and that moment when they emerge from simple ink strokes, and making forms that manifest their inner being. You will have exquisite comics, still drawings and animation that tell colourful, exciting, and dramatic stories - and if that’s not in your fancy, there’s always video editing, motion graphics, and general design.
If you need someone to make comics, design characters, concept art, produce animation or make sprites, art assets and UI elements for video games, ol’ Nik will happilly oblige you!
I’ve exhibited comics and illustrations internationally and won awards, everybody adoring my flexibility of style, and drawing everything from Franco-Belgian and Amercian-inspired to anime/manga-style comics, and also making graffiti and demoscene artwork. There’s always generally an emphasis on vibrancy and cuteness as my favourite artistic direction, although I also work gritty true-crime, film-noir kinds of illustrations for hit multi-million subscriber Youtube channels, and I’ve also designed podcast art, logo art, game art, and written game lore.
Before this, I used to work for five years for my university as a video producer and editor, working on all stages of production and including motion graphics and special effects. You can see one example of my filming, editing and effects work on the showcase video to the left. Today I still work on video editing on occasion: I work with popular indie groups when making music videos, and also provided splendid 2D handdrawn animation for Youtube channels, music artists, documentaries, and environmentalist initiatives.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that my videos have a “music video”-ish sensibility to them.
I always like fueling my inspirations. My biggest sources of creative energy are the 1960s counterculture, the Beatles, psychedelic art, science fiction, high fantasy, the demoscene, and films, video games, comics and music of all kinds.
I’ve shown you my fantasy. Want to show me yours? ;D
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Audition
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Illustrator
Google Drive
Adobe Animate
HTML5
CSS
Adobe DreamweaverA Peruvan filmmaking team approached me because they were making a documentary about the rise of Peruvan rock during the 60s and 70s, an ambitious interactive website/film project called "Etcetera". They wanted an eye-catching, busy, MAXIMALISTIC poster, reminiscent of those 60s Californian psychedelic posters by Bonnie MacLean and Victor Moscoso, but also retain the essentially Peruvan cultural identity of the scene. graphicdesigner illustrator
This was a project where I conceptualised and drew a player character for a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. She is Dia Dia and she is a Chaotic Human Cleric, with a buckler, a cape, and a small handaxe used for offense. Drawn it with real ink and pen on a sketchbook which I subsequently scanned, digitised, and then coloured in phases of doing flats, shading, and fine colouring effects on the outlines and glowing/background splatter. This is one priest you don't wanna mess with! illustrator
My client was making a documentary about the history of the Indy 500, tracing back to its roots with a look specifically in the roaring twenties and thirties, and he needed animated segments with characters that would appropriately fit the sensibilities of the era. My client deliberately asked me to emulate the style of vintage comics like Dick Tracy, and I had to draw them in a way that both portrayed these (real life) personalities accurately, and had a character design and motion that had flair and personality that could easily come across to the viewer. Due to time constraints, and because animation is a labouring process, I had to construct the poses so that they would make the most of static poses, and keep all movement only to the essentials(especially mouth movement and blinking). The gangster on the left, Mike, is a tough, stoic personality, only occasionally drawing from his cigarette and occasionally turning his gaze to another direction. By contrast, Wilbur, on the right, is a racer unreserved in emotion, so I made his gestures short, impactful, and conveying the mood of his lines. Initial animation was done by sketching keyframes, outlining keyframes, and then outlining tweens. I used a consistent black line in Krita to make spaces that would, when closed, be easily fillable with the fill tool with colour. animator videoeditor
A music video for a hard rock band was to be done in the form of an animated comic and these are a handful panels I've taken from it. illustrator
I was tasked to make a short animation of a calendar flipping in a watercolour style for a documentary about Cuba (specifically its brief flirtation with racing in the late 1950s), and I wanted to make it seem amorphous and fluttery. I'm very happy how I managed to make the calendar sheets fly away like leaves. video animator
These characters and scenery are parts of a series of concept art I made for a 3D adventure game set in Africa and Asia. It's about grave robbers who travel around the world on adventure and go treasure-hunting in ancient tombs and temples while fighting monsters and bandits. It's a kid-friendly game with a Zelda-inspired design. The main character is a young boy with a sabre, a grappling hook, a backpack with other gadgets, and a pet monkey. He was born in Egypt in the 14th century. The secondary protagonist is a girl from India that uses stone bolas and throws other projectiles. Together they visit various parts of the world from Egypt to the west to Indonesia to the east. illustrator
"The Ingrids Manoeuvre" is a pilot episode for a comic set in 1960s Britain; the time of mods and rockers, new fashion, and changing social attitudes. I wrote the story, inked, coloured and did the lettering. This is an excerpt of four pages. For the full 16-page comic, see the URL. https://www.twine.net/signin illustrator
A compilation of scenes from an animated biography of a racing champion. Animated in Adobe Animate, with character design and storyboarding. Dialogue's not mine! animator
A sample of motion graphics I made during my peak years of working for Univerzitet Metropolitan 2014-2015. The last one in particular displaying statistics and projections. That graphic is about the lack of IT experts working in Serbia's business sector, and I made this lively animated section with moving and punctual vector drawings, typography, flat planes, glows, and rolling counters. All of these motion graphics are developed in After Effects. videoeditor advert explainervideo animator
A fun little illustration of Jeremy and Nelly, two of my comic characters. Nelly's got an old 8mm camera and is testing it out for the first time. I used this mainly as an exercise in lighting, shadows, colouring and texture. I drew this entirely digitally on Krita, and added some film grain textures and other effects on Photoshop. illustrator
This is a short 10-second animation from the popular Let's Play "Half-Life VR but the AI is self aware" on Youtube and Twitch. I made this as a fan collab where fans each take a 10-second snippet of the original video and try to recreate it in their own animation styles. The audio is the only unaltered element from the original Let's Play. This animation was hand-drawn and painted entirely by me, digitally, on Krita., with effects work and finishing touches on Adobe After Effects. animator
I made this for my university's mobile app contest, where high school kids are invited to group into teams and develop a mobile app project in a 24-hour jam. I personally planned, storyboarded, filmed and edited the project, with the 3D logo provided by a dear colleague. At the time this was produced, we were in the middle of a Star Wars hype because "The Force Awakens" was just recently released in theatres, so we thought it'd be a funny idea to have mobile apps that could procure lightsabers out of them and have a sword fight. The actors, my fellow students from the faculty, held metal rods which I keyframed as lightsabers, and added the appropriate lighting, visual, and sound effects. video advert videoeditor filmdirector
Work in various digital arts applications such as photography, video-editing, sound-editing, graphic design, motion graphics, 3D and 2D animation, game development and web design. I also worked as an intern for five years during that time as a production assistant in the realm of video for the university's own official channels. Finished with an excellent grade.
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