Well! It has been a looong time since ive updated this, nearly 2 years now to be precise, and although I have a fair bit of art to update with im going to start with the most recent piece and work backwards I think.
This idea has been a long time in the coming, A fair while back I saw an awesome piece by the artist Reyyy which was a custom PS3 cover for the game Ninja Gaiden, this awesome piece with a minimal palette that looked to me at least far more interesting than the actual cover that game got.
I looked at that and thought, why arnt more people doing this, its so cool and unique to see, and so many artists I know and follow are heavily inspired by videogames that it made no sense to me that it wasnt more common an occurance.
So from seeing that I wanted to try myself, and I had been saying that for most of the 2 year gap since ive updated here and I recently finally got round to trying it. The game I chose was 'The Evil Within', A pretty divisive game all in all but one I loved throughout, after all its spiritual predesessor was Resident Evil, a game easily in my top 5 favourites of all time.
After running through the whole thing it was pretty clear of all the crazy cast and monsters that the two characters that stole the show were 'The bloody woman' and 'The keeper' so those were what I wanted to focus on in my piece.
First thing I jump into these days is a very rough 2 minute scribble with a thick digital pen, not even focusing on detail or making it look good but trying to get a decent layout or idea, this can take a fair old while and a ton of different sketches which I usually dump if im not happy with and then push with the one im into.
Ive started this scribbling lark recently and found it really helped me loosen up and kind up move laterally around a design alot easier than having one idea and constantly butting heads with it if I cant draw whats directly in my mind, if I keep it loose and quick and not hamstring myself too much too soon i seem to find it much easier to work lately, dunno maybe thats just me.
Once im happy with the quick sketch ill drop the opacity way down (around 20%) take a smaller digital pen and do the same again over the previous layer, only a little tighter this time, paying slightly more attention to details and lighting. I can do this over and over until I end up with 'pencils' I find tight enough for me to ink over.
Early inks into the piece, Easily my favourite part of any job I do. For my inking I use a Cintiq 12Wx and Manga Studio 5, using Frenden's brush 'Nib Linear & Natural' at a fixed 60pt with 0 stabalization (although occasionally flicked up for some longer curves).
2 of my favourite inkers are Wayshak and Charles Burns and although im massively inspired by both of them their styles are complete worlds apart, Wayshak's being much more textured and scratchy whilst Burns' is much more controlled and solid. I tried to strike a balance between the two in this piece with solid outlines and later throughing texture in at this stage.
Everything inked and shaded.
A first attempt at adding texture into my ink phase as mentioned, finding spatter textures to add what would come naturally in traditional art to put into digital was a bit weird but im fairly happy with the result.
For the final stage of the inks I chucked a solid black fill in all the empty spaces to balance the piece back out, I then went back in and added white spatters to that to break up some of the harsher edges a little bit.
I knew going into this that I wanted a monochromatic colour scheme and going with blood red seemed like the obvious choice, especially for anyone whose actually played the game! ;)
When colouring I love to keep the colour count as low as possible as you would notice from my work across the board, I think this comes as an offshoot of my love of screen printing back in University and my love of artists such as Mr Gauky and Drew Millward, The more colours you add to a piece for screen printing the more of a pain in the ass your going to end up with to print so I learned to try and do as much as possible with as little as I could, I just love colouring that way.
To start colouring any piece I drop a solid colour behind the ink layer and move from there.
That black layer was way to harsh against the red, it really didnt look like it was working so great to me, so I did a dark red colour hold on the ink layer just to pull it back a bit. The balancing act is that if its too dark you're pretty much back at square one with the harsh black layer and if its too light the image is far too washed out and you dont really have any wiggle room for additional colouring.
I took a lighter red and coloured all the fleshy parts of the image so that they stand out as the organic features of both front and back were kind of the focal point.
From that last fleshy layer I had a base which I could through the highlights onto. As much as I enjoy the colouring stages I still think im pretty shitty at it, but its one of those things that will get better with work and time.
And finally, I added the lightest colour layer which I guess was blood and details, using spatter brushes again for a bit of an added effect.
Then the dressing and logos, they are just manipulated official logos to fit in with the rest of the image with 2 stroke layers on each. For the back I wasn't sure whether or not to leave it as just the artwork, I thought how it would look of this was an actual box I'd picked up off of the shelf and so I thought id add a quote as ambigious as much of the game itself, the quote coming from the main antagonist Ruvik.
And thats that! I think theres areas all over it that I could improve, general anatomy and design for example. As an artist I rushed in with a focus solely on that, art. I wanted a cool image and didnt pay enough thought to the logo layout and how it would work in the end, but now I know for future ideas and designs.
Ive got a bunch of cover ideas I want to do for the future but who knows what will happen.
