How Riot Artists Think About Composition | Eric Canete

Get my free sketching PDF: https://learnhowtosketch.com My Ultimate Sketching Course: https://www.proko.com/s/rMQf?af=467576 In this conversation, I sit down with my old Riot Games colleague Eric Canete to talk about composition, storyboarding, and how to make artistic choices that actually support the story you're trying to tell. Eric has always been one of those artists whose work I can recognize immediately. His shape design, compositions, and sense of perspective are incredibly distinctive, so I wanted to understand how he thinks through those decisions instead of simply making an image look cool. We start by talking about style and why finding your own voice usually isn't something you can force. Eric talks about being heavily influenced by artists like Peter Chung and how those influences eventually mixed together into something that became uniquely his own. From there, we get deep into composition. Eric breaks down how he starts with the emotion of a scene and then arranges the characters, environment, camera angle, perspective, contrast, and detail around that feeling. We talk about using extreme perspective to create paranoia, directing the viewer's eye with contrast, knowing when to leave areas unfinished, and why adding more detail can actually make an image worse. We also get into storyboarding and some of the mistakes artists make when they're trying too hard to create interesting shots. Dutch angles, complicated perspectives, reflections, and unusual compositions can all be powerful, but only when there's a reason for them. One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is that a good composition isn't just a pretty arrangement of shapes. It's storytelling. Every choice should help control what the audience notices and, more importantly, what they feel. Eric and I worked together at Riot for years, so it was especially fun getting the opportunity to sit down again and really break apart the way he approaches this stuff. If you're interested in illustration, comics, storyboarding, animation, or just making your drawings communicate more clearly, I think there's a lot here you can apply to your own work. My Materials: Moleskine Sketchbook: https://a.co/d/07Wk6ZBf Ballpoint Pen: https://amzn.to/4mAiG7G My Instagram: Instagram: rembertmontald 00:00 Composition Should Serve the Story 05:57 Designing Shots Around Emotion 11:38 Guiding the Eye With Contrast and Detail 16:01 Negative Space, Framing, and Visual Hierarchy 22:10 Stop Trying to Make Every Shot Clever 27:44 Storytelling Through Character and Perspective 33:20 What Actually Makes a Good Storyboard Artist 38:38 Composition for Comics, Illustration, and Storyboards