Range Murata

Japanese artist and designer, known for his unique style heavily influenced by art déco. He is best known for his mechanical and character design work on Last Exile and Blue Submarine No. 6.

Initially aspiring to be a car designer, he attended the Osaka University of Art, where he majored in industrial design. However, after realizing the retro-style designs he wanted to work on would be difficult to achieve in real life, he dropped out and instead opted to pursue a career at the videogame company Altus, where he worked as a part-timer since 1993, mostly contributing character designs and illustrations for the fighting game series Power Instinct under the alias Range. In 1996, inspired by his coworkers, he left the company to become a freelance illustrator, releasing his first artbook, LIKE A BALANCE LIFE, shortly after.

Outside of releasing, planning and editing artbooks and comic anthologies (often in collaboration with numerous other artists notable for their distinct art styles, as was the case with FLAT and Robot), some of his other notable works include fa, a designer clothing and fashion accessory line, a number of cover illustrations for both Japanese and foreign books and magazines, as well as miscellaneous design work for statues and figurines (most notably a tie-in series for the Robot anthology), costume design for the 2005 World Expo in Aichi and character design for the variety show 2.5 Dimensional TV.

In 2006, he was given the 37th Seiun Award.

Since 2013, he has been teaching at Kyoto Seika University's Manga Department's Character Design Course. Artist You Shiina was one of his students.