I’m proud to share with you the special talents and twisted mind of Karol Lasia, who found his way to us from the Netherlands. Almost like fate for the both of us, Karol became a part of our project in the perfect storm of right place / right time. These few images below are from his extensive portfolio (which you can find here: The fantastic Art of Karol Lasia), not from NIGHT KILL, because his unique vision for our film will be revealed as we get closer to the release of the trailer. Hopefully, that will be sometime in February, 2015.
As a World traveler, Karol has been honored in many locales. Here he’s treated as Thai nobility…even if it’s all in his mind. Somehow, he managed to drag me into his nightmare.
(Karol Lasia bio)
I was born to Polish immigrants in the Netherlands in 1986. I never found the schools I attended to be very enjoyable, challenging or supportive of any inherent talents the kids might have had, so as a result I started experimenting with visual software in my early teens. The digital world had been a natural environment for me since I was very young, and the possibilities presented by Photoshop really opened my eyes (and allowed me to circumvent the pitfalls of classical drawing, at which I was decent but never stellar).
As the years went by, school only got more mind-numbing and my creations more interesting, so the previously unimaginable idea of turning this hobby into an actual career slowly began to arise in my mind. After posting my work in online galleries such as DeviantArt, and a drum and bass forum I frequented for many years, I got offered my first paid gig: cover artwork for a DJ mix. I think the budget was 50 euros and I couldn’t have been more excited. One thing led to another and I gradually became one of the go-to artists for artwork in the drum and bass scene (a genre of electronic music).
By my early twenties, I had finally achieved my goal of creating artwork for my favorite artist in that genre, and it felt like this was the right time to move on. The amount of creative freedom was amazing, but the budgets were ever smaller and the number of flaky people starting record labels ever increasing.
I decided to get in touch with several illustration agencies in the country and got picked up by the oldest and largest one in the country. I moved to Amsterdam and finally got the bigger budgets I was looking for, at the expense of a lot of creative freedom (but it was worth it), working for Pepsi, Mercedes-Benz, Adidas and the like. Twice, I was featured in the biannual 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide edition of Lürzer’s Archive, and once in the 200 Best Digital Artists Worldwide edition. A senior art director at Playboy Magazine received a copy and this led to us working together on several amazing editorial projects. Now I had a big budget AND creative freedom! Eventually I was offered a job as art director in Los Angeles, but it didn’t feel like the right move at the time.
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