Arena Fonte Nova: The Mixed Zone
Categories
Advertising & Branding, Character Design
Client
Casa de Apostas Arena Fonte Nova / Museu do Bahia
Project
World Football Idols
Services
Caricature, Character Design
Year
2024
The Challenge:
The “Mixed Zone” at Arena Fonte Nova—the path international teams walk before entering the pitch—needed a visual identity with global weight. The brief was to transform the sterile corridor columns into a gallery of Football Giants, featuring iconic players from various nations like Suarez, Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Brazilian legends who have left their mark on the sport.
The Process (Digital Craft):
This project is a celebration of traditional digital illustration methods, amplified by modern tools.
- Digital Foundation: Every character started as a hand-drawn digital sketch in Photoshop. These roughs were crucial to capture the likeness and the specific caricatural exaggeration of each player’s personality.
- Assisted Blocking: To accelerate the production of 14+ complex figures, I used AI tools strictly for initial color blocking and generic background bases based on my sketches.
- Manual Finish: The soul of the project is manual. The final rendering, skin textures, lighting adjustments, and facial expressions were all painted by hand, ensuring the artistic cohesion that a purely generative process could never achieve.
The Visual Experience:
To showcase the scale of this installation for this portfolio, I created a Virtual Walkthrough (using Kling AI video technology). This motion piece simulates the immersive feeling of walking among these giants in the physical space, creating a digital twin of the real-world environment.
