After a long silence we are now back with some exciting Dev Blog material. We have not been sitting idly on our hands during this time, but rather been following up on post GDC stuff, as well as some other things that you might get to see in the near future. I will now pass the torch to Sofie, who will give you a really nice walkthrough of her creative art process.

Best regards, Peter

Hello dear readers!

Sofie, the lone artist of Black Drop here. The 15th of April SoFE, School of Future Entertainment held their annual game festival, the Game Concept Challenge at the East Pier in Karlshamn. During these days they also held a few competitons for the public, such as 24 hour Code and Concept art challenges. I was fortunate enough to have the day off, and decided to participate in the festivities and compete in the 24 hour Concept art challenge. The Challenge was held by Tarsier Studios and the theme was ‘Warrior God in Motion’.

The art was judged based on three criterias: motion, technical and design. There were many talented artists there, mostly students from BTH and SoFE, but also some who had traveled a long way to compete. The Concept art challenge was won by a talented girl named Jenny Chen, check out the winning art here.

I was happy with my own submission, which took me a little bit over 12 hours to complete, and I actually won second place. As a bonus for you readers I decided to share the process of my piece ‘Aztec Chaos Twins’.

I always start by drawing different tiny concept poses. The judge pointed out that motion was extremely important, so I was mainly aiming for motion when I decided on the pose. Drawing these thumbnail size images always helps me to mentally discard things that might disrupt the important parts of a piece. In this stage, details are better left out, instead focus on the feeling and the flow.

At this stage I edited my perspective just a tiny bit since I wanted more foreshortening, which gave it a bit more motion. I wanted the character to be an Aztec warrior goddess, and if you google ‘Aztec dancer’ you can clearly see my source of inspiration. Being a rough sketch of the details, I still kept motion in mind. It is probably worth mentioning that I’m working in Photoshop CS3, and all the brushes that I use can be created in all CS versions. Any questions on the brushes? Don’t hesitate to ask.

Details! I chose to use lineart for this piece. Mostly since I feel most comfortable with using lineart but also because it feels like lineart is a style I feel is becoming less and less accepted in the professional world of concept art and game making. I also admit that I am somewhat of a lineart-freak, and I wan’t my lines as clean as possible. 90% of my lines are done free-hand, the rest is done using the pen tool. In this stage I work out all the details in the image.

Next I put a grey base on a new layer below the lineart layer. I also start working out the shadows on a seperate layer. I use a standard brush in Photoshop with fussy edges and put ‘Opactiy Jitter’ on pen pressure. Be sure to create both hard and soft shadows, if you use only hard shadows the result will look cel-shaded. Only soft shades will make everything look round which isn’t always what you want. Right now I only focus on the shadows, mostly since I hadn’t decided what colors to use but also because I wanted those shadows to look good even without color. This stage often takes some time, but if this is done good, the rest will be easy.

Ok, now I’ve hidden my grey base and shadow layer and created a new layer in which I put flat colors. I decided on bright, happy colors since many of the Aztec dancers had costumes which was very colorful. Since I had no idea what color theme I wanted, I surfed over to http://kuler.adobe.com/ and simply searched for ‘aztec’ until I found a theme I liked. I highly recommend that page.

I create copies of the grey base and shadow layer and merge them, then I put that new layer, which I simple call ‘merged shadow’, over my flat colors. By changing the blending mode to multiply I get the following result. However it still looks a bit flat and boring. What we need here are colors in the shadows!

To get some nice colors in those shadows I use my flat colors layer. By using the magic wand I select color areas, like in this case, the skin. Then i select my ‘merged shadow’ layer and press ctrl+b which opens the ‘Color Balance’ window. By pulling the three sliders I can change the color of my shadows in three different steps: Shadows, midtones and highlights. This means I can create a shadow which consists of three colors, and by doing so, the shadows become very dynamic. And since the ‘merged shadow’ layer is on multiply you can see the result immediately.

As you can see above, there is a huge difference between them. The colored shadows looks much more dynamic.

Finally I work in the highlights with a soft brush. Finish up the details and the eyes etc. Besides the dynamic shadows and the flats, the highlights adds another level of depth.

Don’t forget the background. When I came to the background of this piece I was too tired to make something extraordinary so I just went with some simple clouds in different colors. I added speed lines to the Chaos pig and the spear, and I also added some overall lightning gradients. The last thing I usually do is a color balance on the whole image to create a complete feeling. And there we have it. Click on the last image to see a high-res version. If you have any questions or comments, just ask.

Cheers,

Sofie

Tags: concept art, linkedin