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Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Zeronis, the artist and designer of KillerGF and ask him a few questions about him and his work. Zeronis was a concept designer at Riot Games for over 10 years and has designed many of their popular champions and skins for League of Legends. He is also a prominent NFT artist, with a large portfolio of anime-inspired work on Foundation and other platforms. On Twitter, he has amassed an audience of over 200,000 followers, and his latest project, KillerGF, is a collaborative anime-inspired avatar project with uwulabs. KillerGF features a secret society of 7,777 female assassins known as the KGF, who have been tasked throughout history to assassinate CEOs, politicians, and even supernatural beings.
What was your introduction to illustration?
In elementary and middle school I began to draw for fun, at the time I didn’t really take classes for fundamentals at all. I came from Korea and didn’t know any English, so the only way I knew how to make friends was to draw. I got into Final Fantasy 7 and StarCraft, and did lots of fanarts for those games and often gave these fanarts out to friends and classmates.
I got serious around the time I went to college. Initially starting in Computer Science because my father did. Obviously, I wasn’t very passionate about it. Art also wasn’t as feasible of a career at the time. There was an Art Major at my school, but instead I chose Product Design because it seemed more practical. I still wasn’t super passionate about it, but it was better. After two years I was rejected from the upper division courses and I didn’t want to wait another year to reapply so I decided to go to a school called Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I was able to connect to many artists and one of my instructors even became a coworker at Riot. The tuition was high, but I think that it was worth it to me. It was like a boot camp, but for art. My work ethic was established there and it really set a foundation for the rest of my art career.
What’s your relationship like with Blizzard Entertainment?
I applied to Blizzard first as I’ve always wanted to work there. I worked really hard (30–60 hours) on my submission for a fan art competition from Blizzard, and ended up winning! When I won, the reward was supposed to be a trip to Blizzcon, but unfortunately they sent the prize to someone else. They apologized and I was actually invited to their HQ. I had dinner with the development team and it felt much more worth it to me than the original Blizzcon prize. I also met the art directors for their lead games at the time, along with many other senior employees and ended up interning there for 3 months. I worked with Gerald Brom, the artist behind the cover art for Diablo II. He’s a gothic painter and it was very intimidating to work with him, but he was a super nice guy.
How did you originally get connected with Riot Games?
I was first contacted by Riot when it was a 40 person team. It felt underwhelming because it was much smaller than Blizzard and I also didn’t like MOBAs at the time. Riot made me a full time offer which I declined because I was still in school. Later, they offered me a freelance position which I took. At that point, I had designed Ahri and Hecarim and I had no idea how big League of Legends or Ahri would become.
Eventually, I developed repetitive stress injuries due to a combination of video playing games, being a student at Art Center, and drawing for myself. I had to take a break of over six months to recover and realized that the injuries were not worth finishing school over. Blizzard was not giving me a full time offer so I decided to go with Riot. I officially met the team of about 400–500 people working there and started working just as League of Legends was growing, becoming one of the biggest games in Korea at the time.
What was your day to day at Riot Games like?
At first, I was working on the champion team, and it was all very fast paced, we were releasing a new champion every two weeks. I was on that team for about six months and designed over nine champions with the team, including Vi. I was drawing all day, pinning different character tropes, stereotypes and story-lines all over the wall. The scope and level of quality control has definitely increased since then, with the average time to create a champion changing to about 3–4 months after I created Gwen.
What is your unique drawing style?
I knew that I needed to make do with what I had. It was very difficult to use a stylus for prolonged periods of time because of the repetitive stress injuries. Throughout the decade of working at Riot, I tried to adapt and put out the highest quality work I possibly could. At first, I started using a wrist brace to help, and then I started to use my left hand for more tedious tasks and would switch back to my dominant hand for precious ones. After that I began to use Procreate on the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil. That didn’t really work for me either so I eventually just started to use my finger instead, which ended up working very well for me.
How were you introduced to Cryptocurrencies?
When I first got my repetitive stress injury it really changed the trajectory of my career. My focus shifted to becoming financially stable because I didn’t know how much longer I could draw, this led me to starting a Patreon to make more income. When I first heard about NFTs I started talking to others and learning more about it and it felt like a way to become financially stable faster. My goal as an artist was always to make my own universe and story lines and NFTs made me feel like I had to depend on fewer people to support my art and still be able to achieve that.
What brought you to Foundation?
When I first heard about NFTs I felt many things. It was a mix of FOMO, uncertainty, and excitement. I wanted to get into it, but didn’t know too much about it. Gaining traction through my account went slowly at first and after a while I decided to take a break from it. Then in August, Morello bought one of my works and it started to become more popular from there. I started to feel really happy and appreciated by collectors and the community at large.
What was your inspiration for KillerGF?
I was thinking about what was trending at the time and how I could contribute to it, and thought that with my background in character design I could do something cool. I always spent most of my time in RPG games designing my character to be exactly the way that I wanted it to look. There were several ideas I had for what direction to go in, but I really liked the juxtaposition of KillerGF. The cute girl, deadly assassin character was a combo that I really liked. I like designing female characters that are appealing. I looked at John Wick for inspiration, as the franchise has some really cool female assassins. I added a few supernatural elements and iconic weaponry that I grew up seeing, and paying homage to different IPs. I was also definitely inspired by the Persona franchise and the game Catherine when designing the characters. Anime’s like Akira and Ghost in the Shell were also a huge source of inspiration.
What made you decide to work with uwulabs for KillerGF?
I had posted on Twitter looking for a developer and everyone said that Kiwi and uwulabs would be perfect for it. I was speaking with two developers at the time and Kiwi made me an even better offer and provided more support. I looked at the success of uwucrew and really thought that we could grow together with KillerGF.
Social Media for all the projects mentioned below:
Zeronis: https://twitter.com/ZeronisART
KillerGF: https://twitter.com/killergfnft
Kiwi: https://twitter.com/0xKiwi_
uwucrew: https://twitter.com/uwucrewnft
Written by Desto: https://twitter.com/desto_eth
