Promised Land Art Festival 2023 — Interview with Art Director Paweł Mielniczuk

Promised Land Art Festival 2023 starts this Sunday! Before it begins, we asked the Festival Director to share his thoughts and give a final glimpse into what to expect.

Pawel Mielniczuk is an art director, character artist, and sculptor with a background in programming. Paweł’s goal as Art Director for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and the Cyberpunk 2077 base game was to help define the visual style of the dark future and bring it to life in the most immersive manner possible. His duties include supervising the entire art process for Phantom Liberty as well as directing Characters, Weapons, and Vehicle Art departments for the base game.

As a CD PROJEKT RED veteran, Paweł has worked on all three installments of The Witcher series as well as the Hearts of Stone & Blood and Wine expansions for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and GWENT: The Witcher Card Game.

Paweł is also the Festival Director of Promised Land Art Festival — an event organized by CD PROJEKT RED in cooperation with the city of Łódź, bringing together professionals working in film, gaming, and other creative industries.

What are your best memories of last year’s Promised Land Art Festival?

The excitement to see so many artists and old friends at one place, after the pandemic. It felt almost surreal.

What can we expect this year? What makes this year’s edition special?

We are introducing many novelties this year to make the festival even better. 

One of them will be acrylic painting workshops led by the phenomenal Marcin Minor. We’ve also got an activity we named Open Talk — gatherings for artists of similar specialties to network, discuss, and exchange knowledge.

I am also quite excited to see how our new setup of the space between EC1 and the Comics Center will work as this year we plan to hold a few activities in the open air.

What does the Promised Land Art Festival have that no other art festival has?

By design, our festival is aimed at active professionals from creative industries. This makes the formula slightly different in comparison to most festivals, which are tailored chiefly toward people looking to just now enter the industry. Although this doesn’t mean that those who are new to the industry shouldn’t join — there is plenty for them to learn as well, and we even created Open Day with the idea of supporting those who are new or looking to break into their respective industry.

Our key mission is to broaden the horizons of our attendees, expose them to experiences and knowledge outside of their comfort zone — crossing disciplines, mixing digital art with traditional art, etc. This is also why we put a big emphasis on workshops — both digital and traditional.

Should an illustrator start using Zbrush or, say, a 3D artist picks up clay sculpting after Promised Land, that’ll mean we delivered a life-altering experience and had an actual impact on someone’s career.

What makes this year's PLAF guests stand out?

Every year our speakers are special — meeting and getting to know them is what excites me the most. This year we are welcoming over 50 incredibly talented artists as speakers and I would dare to say each and every one of them stands out!

To name a few, we’re welcoming representatives from large studios like Masahiko Otsuka, co-founder of Studio Trigger responsible for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Brian Matyas , character designer from Lucasfilm who was working on The Mandalorian, as well as Benjamin Erdt , Lead Character Artist from Blizzard who will tell us more about what it’s been like working on Diablo IV. Among freelancing artists I need to mention the phenomenal Jama Jurabaev who just finished his work on Star Wars: Ahsoka, Peter Han who is coming back to us after a longer break, and my beloved Bastien Lecouffe Deharme .

We will also meet representatives of traditional arts, including Matt Cexwish and Jarosław “Camelson” Drabek, who will bring back miniature painting workshops to PLAF. And the well-known Tomek Radziewicz , together with Romain Van den Bogaert , will host clay sculpting classes featuring a live model for the first time in PLAF history!

Are you looking forward to meeting/hearing one particular artist? What are your personal must-haves of this PLAF edition?

I can’t wait to meet all of them! As festival director, I rarely have the comfort of staying for an entire hour at one place to listen to a lecture, which is why I’m mostly looking forward to networking in the evenings. I love to hear speakers talk about their stories, chat about work and life, and confront their experiences with my own. That's the best part for me.

What message do you want to share for those awaiting Promised Land Art Festival 2023?

Eat well, sleep a lot, and exercise, because during PLAF you need to be at peak form!

If we could, we’d alter time itself, because there’s just so much to do and see during PLAF that 24 hours is simply not enough to feature everything we’d like. So much, in fact, that if we were ever to realize our complete vision, you probably wouldn’t get any time for sleeping or eating at all!

Thank you to Paweł for answering our most pressing questions — looks like this year's Promised Land Art Festival is something that can't be missed!

To get to know our speakers, other special guests, and to buy tickets, visit our #PromisedLand2023 website. See you there, artists!