2023 Senior Exhibition Artists

April Blaszies

Art + Design: Animation + Game Arts

About April Blaszies

April Blaszies is a Massachusetts-based artist who started her journey at four years old filling notebooks with tiny circles to now pursuing a degree in Animation and Game Arts at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. April has been working with primarily traditional materials with a heavy emphasis on marker, ink, and watercolor, however these past three years they have been keener on exploring digital mediums such as digital painting, sculpting, and 3D modeling. April has always had a fascination with how the art, mechanics, and the writing of video games impacts the player’s interaction/experience with the media. This interest has led her down the path of storytelling through concept art from vast world maps down to the most miniscule detail on a character’s design.

Statement

My project is based around the development of the world, characters and lore of my original game concept called Briar Knight. The project started out as a 2D platformer in Unity last year and during that time I have gained a lot of valuable experience from building a functional game within the engine. However, this year I took a step back and decided to work on rewriting lore and making new concept art of the game to further expand and develop the story and characters. The main inspirations for this body of work are retro fantasy art, old dungeon crawlers, and RGPs. I chose to do some pieces as traditional illustrations in watercolor to pay homage to the style of the painted covers of old fantasy novels while keeping the pieces of digital art on the grittier side as well to match the aesthetic of the project. Most of the art has been compiled onto pages that resemble “official guides” or art books of older games to tell the story in a more visually interesting way.