Yoshitaka Amano

Yoshitaka Amano was born in Shizuoka City. The pictures treat a figure as costume and wash. A face is long. A sleeve keeps going. Colour runs the way ink runs. He began at Tatsunoko Production, making character design and concept art for Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, Time Bokan, Yatterman, Casshan, and The Adventures of Hutch the Honeybee.

He later made character and concept designs for the Final Fantasy series. The same hand also worked with other writers: Vampire Hunter D, Angel's Egg, Guin Saga, and The Heroic Legend of Arslan. The game and the film are commissions. The line on the paper is his.

His own titles include DEVA ZAN, CANDY GIRL, and N.Y. SALAD. Visual art has been published in art books around the world, with more than twenty collections. YOSHITAKA AMANO PRIVATE WORKS is a series of twenty volumes of previously unseen personal pictures, beginning with Volume 1: Medusa. Dark Horse Comics is to issue a new edition of Deva Zan in March 2027, with a new cover. ZAN is an original anime project from Yoshitaka Amano Inc.

The studio lists these awards: Seiun Award in 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, and 2007; Eisner Award, Dragon Con Award, and Julie Award in 2000; and Inkpot Award in 2018. In 2026 he is to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Concept Art Awards, during LightBox Expo in Pasadena, on 24 October, at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

Além da Fantasia (Beyond Fantasy) opened at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Belo Horizonte on 10 December 2025, with 218 original works, and ran there through 2 March 2026. Yoshitaka Amano: Beyond Fantasy at CCBB Rio de Janeiro ran from 22 April to 22 June 2026, with more than 200 original works; the Brazil tour is also announced for Brasília. Yoshitaka Amano: Origins 始源 is at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York from 26 September 2026 to 7 February 2027, with the recent Pandora series and pictures from the 1980s and 1990s. Yoshitaka Amano: Big Bang opened at Asia Society Texas in Houston on 23 September 2026: about forty works from nearly thirty years of painting, in oil, ink, automotive paint, and other media. He has also made the artwork for The Weeknd's Japan-exclusive AFTER HOURS TIL DAWN COLLECTION, and the hand-drawn cover for 2hollis's album Pirouette, set for release on 11 November 2026.