The SERAPH!NE Project

In October of 2020, League of Legends released their newest champion, Seraphine: a character that, ostensibly, I should have loved.

She's a singer (like me!) and a magical empath à la Mantis from Guardians of the Galaxy. Through her music, Seraphine is able to give voice to the song of a person's soul and make others experience transcendent empathy with that person. Despite high expectations, Seraphine fell short upon release, getting criticized immediately for her out-of-place design among the established characters of her home in Runeterra, lack of connections to other champions, and overall failure to challenge the status quo. Moreover, her promotion on release as a skin in the K/DA lineup overshadowed her identity as her own unique character.

Practically no one was happy with her on release — myself included. The disappointment I felt toward how her concept was executed became the impetus for this fanatical passion project of mine. I challenged myself not only to re-imagine the character's narrative potential, but also to rework her character design, and ultimately create splash art for her to the tune of other League of Legends champions.

Artwork

Sera's pose in her original splash art was fine for what it was, but it didn't really fit my vision for her new character. Instead of a crowd member's POV, looking up at a celebrity, I had my Sera lying on the side of her stage against the speaker, on a level where she could hold eye contact with an audience member. To me, it helps sell that she's really listening to her audience, instead of speaking over them.

As an avid fan of both the Art Nouveau and the history of counterculture, so much about this project was just artistic self-indulgence for me. After I finished designing my Sera, I couldn't help but imagine the type of artistic presence she'd have in Zaun, where resources were scarce and art was a DIY investment. To that end I decided that I wanted to design a poster for her; one that not only included those notes of Art Nouveau characteristic to the under-city of Zaun, but one that would meet the practical demands of her circumstance. A design like this one that is limited in palette and linework focused would have been within her means to create herself through screen printing — a medium, of course, that is inextricably linked to the aesthetics of punk subculture.

For this poster design, I was influenced by the psychadelic poster designs of 60's and 70's music artists like The Grateful Dead. It's delightfully appropriate to me that the hippie revolution adopted the aesthetics of art nouveau. Whether in the real world or the fictional one of Zaun, those organic free-flowing lines seem to embody the persistence of life, natural and free, in the face of the cold, unfeeling machinations of profit and war.