about The Artist

MAEVE MCMANUS

Artist STATEMENT

Hi, I’m Maeve McManus,

a character and creature artist working across concept art and Digital sculpting. My practice is driven by curiosity and a desire to understand characters and creatures through their form, the themes they carry, and the worlds they inhabit. I sketch, paint digitally and sculpt to explore silhouette, emotion, thematic expression and physical presence, with a particular interest in designs that feel rooted in an emotional world. I have a deep love for stylised and expressive character design. My work often leans towards the whimsical, macabre or subtly unsettling, and I find beauty where these qualities overlap. I am drawn to work that can be sentimental, creepy and emotive: where tenderness exists beside discomfort, and the monstrous can still feel vulnerable or recognisably human. My work explores transformation, femininity, emotive storytelling and the uncanny through exaggeration and distortion. I want the characters I create to feel deeply rooted in their worlds and shaped by the contexts they belong to.

I am fascinated by visual storytelling built through atmosphere and environment. I enjoy eerie, oppressive interpretations of the mundane, where a world quietly suggests its history, emotional tone and the lives within it. I want my characters to feel inseparable from that wider narrative rather than designed in isolation.

I work primarily in Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint for drawing, rendering and photobashing, and in ZBrush for sculptural development. I have experience texturing in Substance 3D Painter and using other software across the creative pipeline. After graduation, I hope to contribute to varied projects, strengthen my abilities and confidence, and build a body of work I am proud to call my own and share. I love being part of a team and working towards something larger than myself. I have plenty to learn, but I am excited by that growth and eager to keep creating, refining my skills and presenting my work with confidence. In time, I would also like to pursue a master’s degree when it could meaningfully deepen my practice and support my career direction.

experience & Aspirations

During my second year, I had the opportunity to work on a project developed for the immersive Dome at Market Hall in Plymouth. This gave me experience of creating work within a collaborative project intended for a specific public-facing context, rather than producing work solely as an individual university assignment. Working as part of a wider creative process helped develop my understanding of collaboration, communication, responding to constraints and considering how creative work is ultimately experienced by an audience.

Looking back, experiences such as this have reinforced how much I value collaborative creative practice. Although character and creature art are central to my individual practice, I particularly enjoy seeing my work become part of something larger: contributing designs, ideas and specialist skills towards a shared creative outcome.

This is something I intend to continue beyond university through several independent game projects being developed with friends and other artists. These projects will provide opportunities to practise within more realistic development pipelines, strengthen areas such as 3D modelling, retopology, texturing and implementation, and learn through collaboration rather than developing my skills in isolation. They also give me a space to experiment, make mistakes and take on increasingly ambitious responsibilities while building portfolio evidence of collaborative production.

I see independent development as an important bridge between university and my longer-term artistic ambitions.