Tonowari

Tonowari was a massive collaborative effort. In addition to doing a bunch of costume and tattoo designs over several years, I was tasked with combining all his costume elements and balancing them off each other to fit nicely together in illustrations like this. Most of the costume elements in this had been designed by the team and then completely fabricated by the amazing weta workshop costume team.

This was one of the many tattoo designs we did for him. I was trying to add a texture to them to show the flowing pattern with which the tattoo was applied to break up the blockiness of them and make them a little more alien and handmade. You can see it well on his shoulder.

I learned so much working on this project from my art directors Stephen Crowe, Jeremy Hanna, and the incredible costume designer Deborah Scott. Thanks, Heaps :)

This image is featured in The Art of Avatar: The Way of Water book along with a tonne of awesome artwork from some very talented folks.