We've just posted a new update featuring an interview with concept artist Charlie Bowater on the design of our key characters:

[link]

Finally! We are very proud to be able to share with you our vision of a game which is close to our hearts. We also hope that you can help make the game a reality by pledging money to our brand new Kickstarter page which you can find here - [link]

As with all Kickstarters, we have a selection of very attractive rewards for those who want to contribute to our cause - t-shirts, art books, CD soundtracks, poster prints, studio tours as well as - of course - the final game! Our team is made up of seasoned developers with a passion to make something beautiful and fun. These are very exciting times for Atomhawk and we want to make sure you can share in the excitement as well!

The official Realm website can also be found here - [link] - and our Twitter feed for the game is here - [link]

Our DeviantArt Realm gallery is also here - [link]

Thank you!

We've extremely excited to show you some new artwork we've been working on! Both galleries feature artwork from two trading card games which you can download right now -


Urban Survivors - [link]

This gallery features trading card artwork for DeNA's Android game Urban Survivors; the game itself can be downloaded here - [link]


Gang Domination - [link]

This gallery features trading card artwork for Gameloft's iOS game Gang Domination; the game itself can be downloaded here - [link]


We will strive to give you future art updates soon!

Atomhawk are very excited to be nominated in the Best Visual Outsourcer category at this year's Develop Awards. We will be keeping all fingers and toes crossed until the winners are announced in July!

We're also delighted to see our friends at Ubisoft Reflections nominated in two categories for Driver: San Francisco. See our concept art for this game at [link]

And more on our fellow nominees at [link]

Atomhawk Design will be giving a talk once again at Develop in Brighton. Atomhawk CEO Cumron Ashtiani will be outlining the many processes involved with creating a unique visual IP and bringing it to life. The talk will centre around our in-house project - The Realm [link] - and will include never-before-seen artwork of the project as well as a new animated trailer.

You can find out more about Ron's talk here - [link]

In other news, we are very proud to announce the launch of our brand-spanking new website, complete with loads of great new artwork and a fabulous new design. The new site allows us to showcase even bigger and better images of our work, including outstanding examples of concept art, marketing imagery, UI design and video production. The site also features a more user-friendly navigation, easier viewing of video content, shareable news and bespoke desktop downloads.

We hope that the site gives you all a better understanding of who we are and what we're up to these days as much has changed since Atomhawk first launched itself on the web almost three years ago. We've also had to make room, physically and virtually, for our four latest recruits - Nick Lewis (Art Manager), Stuart Ellis (Senior Concept Artist), Atey Ghailan (Concept Artist) and Giorgio Grecu (Concept Artist).

Check out the new-look site here - [link]

The Atomhawk team are in high demand this month with two of our artists and our company Director featuring in print and online.

The Feb issue of Imagine FX - [link] - includes another expert tutorial from Atomhawk's Charlie Bowater. Her latest tutorial shows how to create a unique fantasy figure by injecting new life in to an old line art sketch, unveiling some valuable pro secrets along the way. It's out now - turn to page 84 first!

Also check out a new feature on conceptartworld.com - [link] - showcasing a great selection of work from the portfolio of our very own Shaun Mooney. Take a look at some of the featured character and environment concepts below.

Finally our Director, Cumron Ashtiani, delves in to his dark and mysterious past talking to Gamescares.com - [link] - about his love of the horror genre and his past work on The Thing and Redwood Falls. The Thing 2 and Redwood Falls both recently featured in Gamescare's top 5 scariest games that didn't make it!


Shaun's artwork -

[link] - Lego Indy Concept Art

[link] - Mecha Concept

[link] - Monster Concept

Happy New Year from everyone at Atomhawk!

We had our best year yet in 2011 and while we're looking forward to more great things in 2012, we also wanted to start the New Year by sharing some of our collective highlights from the last 12 months.

We've been a part of some awesome new releases this year, with an increasingly vast and varied portfolio of work. We started the year on a high, creating characters and environments for the latest and greatest edition of Mortal Kombat. We were really honoured to work on such a classic game franchise, but the thrills did not stop there.

Zombies are always a favourite subject for our art team here, so you can imagine the excitement when we were not only asked to produce a number of thought-provoking illustrations for Deep Silver's Dead Island, but also saw the zombie smash hit reach number one in the UK game chart and achieve an average Metacritic score of 81% on PC. Dead Island's success was closely rivalled by that of Driver : San Francisco for which we created fresh concept art, video animatics, UI prototyping and functional Flash mock-ups.

Other highlights have included creating character concepts for the "Gunpowder Plot" episode of the free-to-play BBC Doctor Who game, user interface and animated Flash content for Kinect Sports Season Two, and our first step into the casual gaming space with iWin's puzzle game, Jewel Quest: The Sapphire Dragon; we created high-end illustrated backdrops and puzzle board assets, and were pleased to prove that we could apply our high quality art skills to casual games as well as our usual epic action-themed concept art.

Aside from the successes we've shared with our clients, we've also had two major highlights of our own this year - the release of our book, The Art of Atomhawk Design - Volume One, was a great testament to our first year's work. Secondly, the development of our own IP in the form of Realm, has helped us to keep our creative wits extra sharp. We've been blown away by the positive response we've received from the release of the early concepts, as featured in our last journal entry.

We're continuing to develop Realm further, and look forward to releasing a new animated trailer early in the New Year. We also have loads of great new client work in the pipeline which we must keep quiet about for now, but will be sharing as soon as possible over the coming 12 months.

In the meantime, here are some of our favourite Atomhawk images from 2011:

Doctor Who : The Adventure Games (Gunpowder Plot)



Jewel Quest : The Sapphire Dragon

To celebrate our 2nd birthday, we've decided to give you all a sneak peak at one of our new creations. This project is an in-house idea that we will be developing further over the coming months; for now it is just known under the codename of "Realm".






It is a fantasy story about a little girl who embarks on an epic journey to save her village. On her travels she meets a host of elemental creatures, some friendly and some dangerous... but that's all we can say for now! Click on the images above to see some new artwork from Realm!



Also click on the image above to check out a close up of our zombie cake. For those interested, the cake is made entirely from vector art! Thank you for your support for the past 2 years - we look forward to many more years to come!

Our best kept secret is finally announced! We are pleased to be able to disclose that we have been involved in the biggest web sensation of the year - Atomhawk Design partnered with leading digital agency, TH_NK - [link] in the development of Pottermore™ for J. K. Rowling.

You can watch J.K. Rowling's Announcement Trailer - [link] - and you can register your e-mail to express interest at the official Pottermore™ site - [link] ! Our involvement has been significant as the art studio has been responsible for supplying all the illustrations, a handful of which has already been released to the press:

[link] - The Gateway

[link] - Hogwarts Express

[link] - The Chessboard Chamber

[link] - Christmas at Hogwarts

Watch this space for more when the project goes live!

If you know your videogames, you know that the new Mortal Kombat game has just been released. We worked closely with the extremely talented team at NetherRealm Studios on artwork for characters and environments. We also helped produce a fair selection of the character endings which was great fun! We can finally reveal some of the released art for the game in a new gallery - [link]. Hopefully in the future we will be able to add more pieces of concept art when we have clearance for them. For now, click on that link and have a closer look at the work!

In other news, our new artbook - The Art of Atomhawk Design Volume 1 - is out there and available from a variety of places including 3DTotal's online store. You can pick up a copy from here - [link] . We have got some great feedback from those who bought the book, and we're very happy with how it turned out. We've also just finished judging final entries for our Atomhawk Design Challenge. You can see the finalists here - [link]. We'll announce the winners of the Wacom swag very soon!

Our first ever art book is almost out! You can now pre-order the book direct from 3DTotal - the publishers themselves. The first 200 pre-orders placed at the 3DTotal online shop ([link] will receive a free and exclusive Atomhawk Design t-shirt!

The Art of Atomhawk Design Volume 1 comes in its own hardback slipcase and features over 500 examples of our concept art from a variety of client-based projects as well as some of our own artwork, sketchbook work and breakouts. Each piece features unique insights from the artists themselves, giving you an idea into the creative processes involved.

We are really, really looking forward to getting the book out there. It's been a fantastic process putting it together, and we hope that you will be able to experience it soon. You can also check out a Flash-based preview of what's inside the book here ([link] along with a bit more information regarding the book itself.

Keep an eye out as we will be periodically updating our DA page with a variety of artwork from the art book!

The latest issue of ImagineFX features a generous helping of Atomhawk goodness - our very own Charlie Bowater (who also has a DeviantArt page you can check out here - [link] ) painted the cover as well as provided a tutorial full of guidance behind how the cover art was created. We are also featured in the Studio Profile of the magazine - a two-page spread which showcases what we are up to and our plans for the future.

You can order the magazine direct from ImagineFX here - [link]

-

Also don't forget that The Art of Atomhawk Design Volume 1 - our first art book - will soon be available to you to purchase! You can pre-order the book from amazon.com - [link] and amazon.co.uk - [link]

The secret is out! We've teamed up with 3DTotal to bring you The Art of Atomhawk Design Volume One! This 192 page book showcases a large selection of the fantastic art created by one of the world’s most creative digital art studios. Covering a variety of subjects and themes, and diverse range of styles in a breath-taking fashion The Art of Atomhawk Design is a must have book for anyone interested in this field.

You can check out more about this book - and a look at our new showreel here - [link]

-

You can pre-order the book from amazon.com - [link] and amazon.co.uk - [link]

We've got something to show you. It's pretty sweet, but we need a favour off you guys - we need to get to 600 followers on Twitter before we can spill the beans. There's a teaser image above, though we'll reveal a lot more when we hit that magical number.

You can hit us up on Twitter - [link] Trust us, this is an awesome announcement and we can't wait to reveal it to you!

edit - Cat's out of the bag... [link]

Atomhawk Design is now one year old! It's been quite the journey up to this point, but we've done some amazing things in this relatively short time. We've increased our client base - which we've only now been able to reveal to you - and still have some clients we have yet to reveal. We've also expanded and moved offices from the modest space when we first began a year ago, to an office three times the size with twice the employees.

Exciting times are ahead for us, and we'll share new announcements with you here and on the Atomhawk website when the time is right.

Thank you for all the favourites, devwatches, kind words and llamas you have given us during our first eight months on DeviantArt. Keep an eye out for more artwork from us in the future!



edit - Thanks to everyone who favourited and made possible the Daily Deviation for Church Cloisters! Due to the vast influx of favouriting, comments, etc., we unfortunately can't thank everyone individually like we usually do. Rest assured, we thank you all!