The Tree of Life

Note: I am reposting this from my Tumblr. It usually works the other way around, with the Tumblr serving as a means to promote this blog, but this one hastily-written Tumblr post actually resulted in more reaction than what my blog posts here do, so I said why not? Perhaps I stumbled into something that meant something to someone.

The man who made this illustration passed away this week.

Hiro Isono, the man who created promotional illustrations for the Secret of Mana games (including this one and this one), did something that not many artists working for video game companies can do: Rather than just drawing from the game itself, he envisioned the essence of the it, that spirit of adventure and all that, and in doing so he created an entryway into a colorful, new world. It helps that these games had a big impact on me, but I actually think the art stands up on its own. Why else make art than to dream up something up that doesn't already exist in real life and make the viewer wish so badly that it were real?