Just curious as to why splash arts don't have a common theme. It just kind of bugs me, I don't get why the updated ones are becoming more realistic looking while we still have a lot that are cartoonish. Ex. would be Cho's new splash compared to his skins. Ori too is a good example.
Why don't all splash arts share a common style?
The quality has evolved over time as we hire better artists and our current ones level-up their skills.
Because we started out as such a small company, our quality standards were much much lower, now that we've grown as a company, as artists individually, and now have the ability to attract the industries top talent (who level us all up as artists very quickly), the art quality has increased ten fold (or a million fold...I don't know how much a fold is).
You can see this in every art aspect in our game, models, animations, effects, splash...
The boom of new splashes is in an effort to help bring our base splashes inline with our current style.
I would say that the obvious answer is because they don't have one guy doing all of the splash arts. Individual artists have individual styles. If you look at a superman comic drawn by one artist and a superman comic drawn by another, they look very different. This isn't because the company said "Let's have somebody draw him just a little differently" it's because different artists produce different results. If you're a fan of trading card games, think about the art on those cards. those companies also use a team of artists, and you'll find each has a recognizable style. To try to make them all conform to an exact common style is just not feasible. It's more noticeable in LoL because the art is so much bigger, you really have an opportunity to view the details.
I look at these splash arts(and any other art in League promotions, etc) as being an artist's interpretation of a character. What matters most is that it looks good and gets you excited about the character, I find that more important than making sure they all look like they were done by the same artist.
By cartoonish I assume you mean a lot of the Chinese art (Amumu, Malzahar, Kassadin etc) which were just thrown in over the years to replace some really bad old art. From the sounds of it Riot is looking to replace all of the Chinese art as well as what remains of the original outdated art so you'll just have to give it some time (which you can do now that they appear to be rapid-firing new art finally!)
Though it is odd when we get something like cassiopeia that does look pretty different from other recent new art (it looks CGI tbh :S ).
Ehr, pretty obvious: there are many different artists, and even if you can hire/make them focus on a particolar style each one is a special snowflake of his own. Heck, an artist needs to be that else is not a sellable artist! They try to mix up while doing a plash art but that does not mean there is always an average with results. Deal with it :\
Could you reiterate? Do you mean old pastel art like that of Singed's old splash art? This seems to be more of a quality thing as League's art improves, not necessarily about a consistent art style.
