Laura Vatovani

Want to see more?

If you are intrigued by me you can check more of my work below. I have created an assortment of the favorite project I worked on, be it during study or as freelance work.

Kitika art&craft by Vilma Vatovani s.p.

Kitika is part of my mother's sole proprietorship company, that she started in the early 2000. After we expanded her business into the souvenir market for our country in 2015, we established the brand name Kitika for our lines.
My role in the company was quite vast. I created all of the print designs that we turned into merchandise and some designs where created exclusively for stores in certain Slovenian cities.
I was responsible to keep track of the inventory, ordering prints, creating print files, and textile and sublimation mug printing.
I also helped with sales and worked on our social media presence, while also being in charge of getting us into conventions.

During my employment I would also participate in purchases of material, coming up with new business ideas and what areas we could expand further, as well as coming up with new or update old designs and also fitting current designs for new products.
Other graphic design tasks were to create the design for our textile tags, business card, stand posters and more.

History:- started in 2015 with two designs. The first merchandise created was: T-shirts, postcards, puzzles, mugs, notebooks and mousepads.- 2016 we expanded the designs with 5 new illustrations specifically made for charms/keychains. We also bought our own heat press and started printing on textile by ourselves. This gives us the ability to to expand our products further, offering lavender pillows, aprons and bags. Here we also achieved our first collaborations with local stores in different towns, with custom designs of their choice.- 2017 we acquire a mug heat press and later in the year also invest in our own printer for cotton fabric.- 2019 was our record year in sales pre-pandemic.- 2020-2022 business slows down, but manages to get through the rough time, with business steadily growing again. New designs have been introduced in 2022, which showed great interest in the customers frequenting our stand.- 2023 new printing method with DTF foil introduced to the business, expanding our colour scheme to offer darker colours as well.- 2024 new record sales achieved.- 2025 introducing stickers to our assortment of goods.

Sanaia_art

Sanaia_art is my own brand, my alias when posting my art online. At first it was just a user name I used in the online space, but it soon evolved into my identity as an artist.
Sanaia is the name of the avatar or persona that I created for myself, which in 2023 was turned into a png virtual youtuber design I used for streaming. She is a cat girl with snowflake inspired angel wings on her back. The first design of Sanaia was created in 2015.
In 2024 I decided to created a virtual youtuber aka vtuber model, for my streaming channel, which allowed me to expand my reaction possibilities as well as learning new skill sets.

Stream assets

During my preparating for streaming I have also created all of my assets for streaming, including the overlays, badges, emotes, alert animations and a starting screen animation.
It required me to expand my skills to pixel art using Aseprite and frame by frame animation using Clip Studio Paint.

The concept

Reference sheet

Outfits and hairstylesSanaia has an impressive amount of outfits and hair designs that accumulated during the years. Her vtuber model comes with 5 outfits and hairstyles that were mostly newly designed except her original look.
Below you can see the first 6 designs I have created for her between 2015 - 2020.

The lore

Sanaia lives in a world I have created for her and my other original characters called The sphere world. In it she has the role of the high priestess and has the duty to protect and care for the sphere world in tandem with a guardian dragon who lives outside the world and protects its borders from there.Official lore
Guarded by a dragon outside and a high priestess inside, the Sphere world is situated inside a crystal ball, that is nested on a stalagmite pedestal.
The light and day inside the sphere matched the daylight with the outside world. Through an opening just above it the sun would shine in every day and the other crystal shell would help disperse it around the inside world, creating an interesting and unique environment inside.

The vtuber model

In 2024 I finally decided to create my own vtuber model. This meant I had to learn a whole new set of skills, from how to draw the model, how to cut up the art for the rig and how to do the rigging itself in Live2D Cubism.
It took me a few months to learn all of these skills and I have so far created 3 model arts and also rigged 3 models. With each rig I have added more to my rooster of what I know how to animate as well as learning how to create animations with the rigging parameters.

History:- design created in 2015 Sanaia's wings were the first piece in what is today my personification online. Since then she has been a staple in my online presence on social media instead of using my real photos.Her design has also changed a bit since its inception, but still reflect my image in it fairly accurately.- in 2021 I opened my own company Sanaia art&design during my study to be able to take commissions on the side to bring some extra money to the household.- 2023 i created my pngtuber, so I could start streaming on Twitch. Unfortunately at the end of the year I had to close my company.- 2024 I decided to expend my skill set and created my own vtuber model, which meant I needed to learn, how to prepare the art for the model and also learn to rig it using Live2D Cubism.- 2025 Today I am working on expanding my rigging skill as well as adding animation to the rooster of things I can do in Live2D.

System Under Surveillance - S.U.S.

For my internship during my AP degree I decided I wanted to work with a gaming studio to gain some experience with the work environment in the industry. While it was a small studio mainly driven by 2 people, it was still one of my most valuable experiences. I got to work in a team during the COVID-19 lock-down, which had its own challenges but we were also a diverse team from people of different backgrounds that worked together towards a shared goal.
I was very happy with my mentor in the company, who guided me through several tasks in the company. I created the game logo as well as the company logo, I created banners for the website and social media accounts, I also tackled an in game environment asset and even creating a custom font, while during my final exam I decided to continue working with them and expanded my work to creating a new UI look, start menu and a game manual booklet, while tying it all together into a visual design manual for the game.

Banners for digital content

Since the game was done in pixel art, instead of using a combination of digital art and pixel art, they decided to make everything in pixels. So I was tasked first to create an interesting banner composition, that would work for the different social media sites as well as steam and itch.io where the game was going to be sold at.

Game asset

I got to work on one element that was implemented in the game to break the environment of concrete and buildings and make it feel a bit more like cities today, which was the holographic tree.
It was a challenging experience and for the task I had to learn some basic skills within the Godot engine, so I could test the model in the game environment while creating it.
I was only responsible for the graphic and animation, the actual implementation into the game was done by our developer.

Custom pixel font, UI and start menu

While working on the logo I created a custom font that could also be used in game. It was an interesting experience and thought me a lot about font creation.
For my final exam right after the internship I was tasked with the creation of a new User Interface for the game. I created it using element already existing in the game design itself and incorporated it into the UI design. I was also tasked with creating the main menu screen for the game. The idea was that the game would start by the player opening the comic on the desk in front of them.That idea was later scrapped, but I still want to include my work here.

Advertisement & more

I received a follow up request a year after my internship to help with the creation of a new thumbnail and advertisement background for the game to boost its sales on Steam. I was also asked to update the old website banner as they have adjusted the design of the main character.

Various projects

In my time as a graphic designer I have tried a lot of different aspects of graphic design. Here I would like to share some of my favourite projects I tackled during my study and outside of it.