Meet Christine Choi | Character concept artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Christine Choi and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Christine, why did you pursue a creative career?
I didn’t have a lot of means to entertain myself as a kid growing up in a strict household up until my late teens, so whenever I used up my allotted 30 minutes of weekend gaming, I had to get imaginative and familiarize myself with the toys and drawing materials at my disposal. At first I only pursued an education in art because it was the only thing I felt even a little comfortable doing most of the time. It wasn’t until about 2015-2016, when I finally had less restricted access to the internet and other video game consoles, that I became aware that creating art for video games was a viable career option-combining two of my greatest joys in life as a job sounded too good to be true, as difficult as it is today to actually achieve. If I ever do manage to provide work for any larger scale game project, I certainly hope I can do my part to show people like my younger self the merits of games as an art medium.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Up until recently my art was really not very unique for a Korean American character design student… It featured a lot of conventionally attractive humans or humanoids inspired by characters from popular video games and honestly still kind of does, though over time my new friends and teachers have helped encourage me to gradually explore different and thoughtful solutions to character designs beyond putting safe, trendy outfits on conventionally attractive characters. The process of transitioning away from those designs was as difficult as it was genuinely enlightening; learning more about character design from them helped keep me sane during school. I hope that if my work ever makes it into a larger piece of media that it can help people appreciate beauty outside of the conventional (Eurocentric/heteronormative) standards.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I’m not going to lie, with what little free time students at my school are given, most of my free time has been spent on staying home and sleeping, cleaning up, preparing portfolio work, or playing video games, so I haven’t been able to explore LA properly. There are certainly a good amount of museums that I think are worth visiting, such as the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum or the Norton-Simon Museum, and the Huntington Library has a nice rotation of artists’ works throughout the year. Chinchikurin in Little Tokyo has some really good okonomiyaki that I try to get whenever I’m downtown.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
There are several people I could name and credit for helping me stay grounded and improving, I’ll just name the first few who gave me permission to mention them: Bea Abreu: We met at school pre-covid and kind of bonded over our mutual interest in video games and frustrations with being art school students, namely in our department’s inability to provide resources for aspiring concept artists. Not too long ago she took the initiative to create a portfolio and take classes outside of school, all while taking classes full time in order to transfer to a different department. While I could not imagine doing something so monumentally masochistic, the curriculum of, and new classmates she’s met in the new department have visibly improved her psyche, and the technical improvement she’s made in that time is phenomenal. Her undertaking has inspired me to go out of my comfort zone and do more to take my pursuit of becoming a character designer into my own hands.
Lawrence Hong: We also met at school pre-covid and bonded over our mutual interest in video games and frustrations with school. Despite having high ambitions on his own end, I couldn’t possibly repay him for the time and energy he’d set aside to help me and others like myself on anything from improving our technical drawing abilities to presenting the conditions around the current games and animation industry through a more pragmatic lens.

Instagram: asphodelles

Twitter: asphodellesart

Other: artstation @asphodel

Image Credits
image 3 (white haired woman with the blue/white/gold outfit) is a soft redesign of a guild wars armour set done for a commission image 4 (three iterations of a woman with a dagger) is a fan design of a Dragon Age Inquisition player character image 5 (illustration of a woman in a blue jumpsuit carrying weathered trash) is fan art for the game series Fallout