Congratulations to Mihai Andru Sandu from Middlesex University London, our winner of the Character Art category in Search For A Star 2023!

Always one of our most popular categories, we had nearly 250 students signing up to take part in this year’s Character Art challenge. Students were given a project brief co-developed with games studios across the UK, to develop an original character based on one of four themes. Each had 4 weeks to create, document and present their projects to our assessment teams.

After reaching the Rising Star finals last year with a uniquely stylised character, Andru stepped up once again with another memorable project. Choosing the theme of ‘Future Imperfect’, Andru took a philosophical approach and created a character with their own depth of history to be uncovered (you can check out Andru’s project video below). At the final interview, the judges were impressed by Andru’s strong portfolio and driven approach to further developing their technical skills, earning him the winner’s spot!

“The best part [about Search For A Star] is getting my work reviewed by industry professionals, receiving feedback, and having future job opportunities.“

This year’s Search For A Star Character Art challenge was created alongside our studio partners as a way of helping game art students to create a portfolio piece that showed exactly the type of skills that studios want to see from graduates starting a games career. Thank you also to our judging panel for the SFAS Character Art challenge, Glen Fox from Free Radical Design, Christoffer Stai from Bulkhead, and Joe Sutcliffe from Aardvark Swift.

After Andru’s interview, the judges shared with us the reasons behind their decision:

“It was a close final so we really looked deep into Andru’s work and portfolio. His character displayed so much personality and could easily be a game-ready asset, plus showed that Andru has a great understanding of the development pipelines for creating studio-ready work.”

Congratulations once again to Andru, and we look forward to seeing a whole lot more from him in future 💚