The Portfolio of Ariel Celestino
Tailor-made design and development, serving the biggest studios in entertainment and original IP development across video, illustration, comics, games, and interactive media.
Ariel Celestino, musician, artist, designer and developer
Born in Argentina, raised in New York City, and based in Los Angeles, Ariel Celestino grew up absorbing everything: punk and rap as they were being invented, graffiti moving from subway cars to gallery walls, European comics that treated the medium as serious art, science fiction that asked real questions, and the collections at MoMA and the Met. That foundation across music, art, comics, and street culture shapes everything he makes.
Ariel is a creative director, designer, illustrator, developer, and musician who has built a career working across mediums rather than being defined by any single one. His work spans film marketing, branding, sequential art, web development, animation, music composition, and generative AI production pipelines. He published MechaOrganic, an original science fiction comic exploring human-technology convergence, and runs Mecha9ine Inc., his creative studio for original IP development across comics, games, and interactive media.
Design, illustration, animation, video and front-end development are each shaped in close collaboration with the client and fitted to the property rather than to a template.
The toolkit is always evolving. Alongside Adobe, Blender and code, current work includes AI-assisted pipelines for image, video, animation and app development, all curated and used as a force multiplier for human creativity.
Design, development, video, and AI production for studios, agencies, and original IP.
Art direction, logos and title treatments, album and poster art, character design, storyboards, and comics, in traditional media or digital.
Websites, web games, and interactive storytelling, from design through development.
Video editing, motion graphics, and animation for trailers, sizzle reels, music videos, and social content. Original music composition and sound design.
AI-assisted concept art, character and environment design, previs, animation, and finishing for film, games, and marketing.
Helping studios and creative teams build their own AI production pipelines: evaluating tools and platforms, designing workflows around existing artwork and brand standards, creating reusable prompt templates and documentation, and training teams to run them.
Custom tools, web apps, and production scripts built with AI coding assistants, such as automated design-to-code workflows and interactive learning tools.
Server administration, Linux systems, hosting, email and DNS, and workspace migrations.
Reach out for info on how to collaborate.
Creative Director
ariel@mecha9ine.com
818.448.1218
Reach out for info on how to collaborate.
Book design and illustration for Josh Lawson’s The Lost Year, a humorous cocktail book born from the 2020 lockdown, when a weekly #ThrowItBackThursday drink became 52 weeks of cocktails from around the world. The brief called for mid-century design, a natural fit for the golden age of the home bar.