Important things first: I’m a freelance Concept Artist and Illustrator, I work in the Video Game Industry, in Publishing, and for several Role Playing Game as well as Trading Card Game IPs

Below are a few of the clients I work with, along with the projects I am/I’ve been involved with, in no particular order:

I know for a fact that no one ever reads the “bio” section in any website, so I was kind of tempted to write some random and odd stuff such as “I come from a different Space-Time continuum to bring forth the Word of Yog Sothoth ” and see what happened.
Then I decided to stick to the conventional bio, but only for the sake of tradition.

Anyway, I come from Italy, and I am shocked to report that I am now 45 years old.
I started drawing in primary school, doodling on my school desk and frustrating my teacher a lot. No significant artistic event from that age on, until at the age of 15 I discovered role playing games. From then on I started drawing loads and loads of elves and orcs and dragons and faeries, which are a normal step in the evolution of every good illustrator.

I attended a scientific school that normally would give virtually no room to any art class.
Fortunately I had a really good art teacher there, who was very picky about traditional media (the only one available at that time I’m afraid), Greek classics, Italian renaissance and so on. If it hadn’t been for that teacher I would probably still be drawing elves and orcs and dragons and faeries (which I kept drawing for some other years anyway.)

After college I attended the Architecture faculty in Italy and it took just a few years to realize that designing buildings would never be my job.
In the meantime I kept doing a lot of doodling but on bigger desks now, which gained me some popularity amongt many fantasy games geeks but no academic recognition.
Then, after university I eventually decided to pursue a career as an illustrator, or at least in some job that implied an artistic effort of some kind.

So, with the few notions in CG learnt at school, I suddenly started expecting people to refer to me as a “generic freelance graphic designer” and I ventured into the unexplored world of advertising. As most of other young freelancers I sort of alternated a few sporadic work commissions to, well, non-exactly-artwork-related-jobs, such as fast foods, insurance companies, a winery and so on.
Things that pay the rent, so to speak (the winery was fun though).

By that time and occasionally up to recently, I also worked as a proper painter. I would paint huge trompe-l’oeils in people’s houses, and I loved it.

Anyway, after a while I eventually got hired by an advertising company and I worked there for five years. After that time, inspired by my wife-to-be, I decided to go back to working as a freelance, and just like every other freelance I hugely enjoyed freedom and working in my underpants, even if struggling with bills and accountants and things like that.

Then in 2006, for some reason, I stumbled upon the website of Team 17, the glorious developers of Worms back in the golden age of gaming. They were looking for artists, I thought ‘hey, how cool would it be to work at Team 17? ‘ and – to cut it short – ta-daan, we all moved, my fiancee, our three kids, a forty kilograms dog and a cat, all in sunny West Yorkshire.
After four happy years at Team17 we decided to have a change of scenery and move South, working as a Lead Concept Artist at Jagex, in Cambridge.

In 2015 I moved back North to work at Sumo Digital in Sheffield, which I enjoyed quite a lot.
I spent two years there, of a total 11 in England, when my family and I thought it was a good time to get back home. So we packed our few belongings, our many pets, and headed South to the beautiful Salento, at the tip of Italy’s heel.
In fact, it’s so nice here that I can’t help posting a picture of my surroundings, for all that matters.

So there you go, freelance again. I’m sure third time is the charm:)
As of now, I work in my swimming trunks at the cool projects you can see above, I still paint the occasional dragon and, with mixed results, I try to fish from the rocks close to my house.