Bio:

Michael Dashow is an accomplished, proven game-industry Art Director and professional illustrator. His favorite genres to work in are science fiction, fantasy and steampunk. He primarily works digitally, although has also been known to work in watercolors. He enjoys developing character-driven pieces, especially humorous ones.

Michael has been working in the videogame industry for over 20 years as an art director and artist. He has done character and environment design and concepting, 2D and 3D animation, modeling, texturing, rigging, effects, and even voice acting. The highlights of his career include working at Blizzard Entertainment working on Diablo II and Diablo III, and being the Senior Art Director at mobile game developer Kabam, where he grew the art team from 5 artists to ~60, oversaw learning opportunities and growth among the art team, and worked directly on projects including Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North, Arcane Empires, Spirit Lords, and Star Wars: Uprising. More recently, he was Art Director of the unreleased AAA mobile game Guardians of Haven at Gree International.

Michael's work has been featured in Spectrum, Expose, ImagineFX magazine, and Fantasy Art Magazine among others. His work has been included in Expose (editions 5, 7, 10, 11 & 12), The Future of Fantasy Art, Steampunk: The Art of Victorian Futurism, and Digital Painting Techniques 3, for which he penned the intro to their steampunk chapter. Awards include several CGSociety Challenges, Dominance War III, Comicon Challenge, and the Facebook Character Design Challenge. He was a Chesley Award winner (given out by the Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists ) for his cover for Peter S. Beagle’s ‘The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche,’ which won for Best Paperback Book Cover of 1997, the first digital piece to ever win a Chesley.

More recently, he has been doing a bunch of work on tabletop games, including all of the artwork and graphic design on Jellybean Game’s successful Kickstarter of ‘Dracula’s Feast: New Blood,‘ and ‘Night of the Mummy’ as well as work on Muse Awakenings (QSF Games) and a handful of still-to-be-launched titles. He also enjoys indie game development. In the past he worked on a puzzle game called MageMaze and a turn-based strategy game called Dwarfare and is currently working on an unannounced puzzle game. He also runs The Trinquétte Challenge, a monthly drawing challenge on Facebook with 19,000 followers.

He lives in Oakland, CA, USA, with my wife Talia and our kid Zachary.