P-Studio Art Unit Interview About the Persona Series Character Design Process at Atlus

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Reggy
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Help Me!

If we could transition to something very rudimentary: the players can’t tell which pieces in the book the Art Unit worked on.

Oribe: I think we’ll know when we see them. Obviously. (laughs)

Would you then choose some that stand out, and tell us who worked on which?

Oribe: Let’s see… we all helped on the Weiss Schwarz one, right?

Kabayashi: I was in charge of drawing Arsene, but I had trouble with the picture’s composition, so I asked for assistance.

Assistance?

Kabayashi: Trading cards usually have flashy art, with stunning effects and light. I’ve never drawn anything like that, so I asked for help when I got to Arsene’s head and torso.

Shimada: I worked on Arsene’s hands.

So that level of micromanagement exists.

Soejima: Sometimes they’re assigned to draw certain portions for a piece.

Oribe: There are also times when someone asks for help, and that other person immediately volunteers to collaborate.

Shimada: Kabayashi-san was the one who drew most of the cover art for the P5 Official Setting Artbook, but I was originally supposed to draw 5 frames for the characters except the Protagonist and Futaba. They didn’t turn out well, so I asked Kabayashi-san to help.

Do these sort of reassignments occur often?

Kabayashi: They really do. And when we can’t resolve it, we go to Oribe-san and Soejima-san.

Oribe: At first they come as casual requests, but when it gets to the point they don’t really know what to do anymore, we take over and work on it. There haven’t been as many instances of that lately, however.

Soejima: Nope, hardly any.

Kabayashi: Everyone’s doing okay with regards to their artwork.

Oribe: These days, we help out with things like composition, and color. The latter is particularly difficult.

Shimada: Speaking of color, we had a hard time deciding on a palette for the Official Setting Artbook…

Oribe: That’s true. The background color for the panels on the cover is red, but initially, there were different backgrounds for each of them. There was a risk of not being able to perceive the art as one whole image… I eventually thought, “We should’ve just gone with red as our main color”, and it worked out well when we tried it. With that, everything else was easily settled, and we finished the illustration. We were quite at a loss until that idea had come up.

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