Volcano

I said I wasn't going to share everything, but I like how this turned out, so I'm posting it.

Angry

This was another piece for the game I'm working on. I'm not planning on posting all the art for it, but I liked how this one turned out, so I thought I'd share.

Long time

It's been a while since I posted anything. I've been working on other stuff for the past couple months and haven't really pulled out the tablet till a couple days ago. It took me a couple of drawings before I made anything worth showing, but here's the result. I tried to focus more on her expression, and I don't think it turned out too bad.

Better concept with style

This is just a work-in-progress, but I felt like I needed to post something to make up for the last post, which in my opinion was kind of crappy. This is another concept for the the same hooded character, but this piece has more interesting contrast and a lot more personality.

EDIT: Here's the final product. I basically added more shading.

Similar

This character is similar to another character in the game, so it almost looks the same. I think I'm going to need to rework it a little so it's unique.

New Concepts

I think I spent too much time working on this one. The city turned out alright, but overall this one could have been better. Anyway, this is the first drawing on my new Wacom Intuos tablet. It started out as just a doodle and I ended up making it into a concept piece. Also, I'm adding an image of the detail on the city because I didn't want the part I spent the most time on go to waste since I ended up blurring it out in the end.

Detailed concepts

These are obviously more concept art pictures. I spent a little more time on the last one, but I think it paid off. Enjoy. Or don't.

Baseline

I'm starting to experiment with different styles of drawing. However, I wanted an illustration to base everything off of. I intended this to be very rough, but I ended up spending a couple of hours on it. Ultimately, the thing that made this image was the decision to outline everything in black. I think both the color and black-and-white version turned out alright.

More Concept

I didn't spend nearly as much time on this one as the last piece, but I think it still turned out pretty good.

Game Concept

This piece took me way too long. It was cool to see the progress, though. I'm including four different images that represent the different stages of my process. It might be interesting for some people to see this.

The first picture was just a quick sketch of this character class for the game. The next sketch was one of a few different concepts that I went through. Ultimately, this is the one that I went with. The next sketch is the beginnings of a full illustration. I got the pose down, but the background and some other details changed a bit before the finished product. And last is obviously the finished product in color. It took a while to figure out exactly what I wanted in the background, but I ended up choosing this train station kind of setting. I also tried to incorporate a bunch of stuff I've been learning about for the past few months. It's not necessarily the best picture ever drawn, but I think it turned out alright.

Some sketches

Looks like I go a couple of months without drawing anything and then I start up again. Hopefully this time I'll be able to keep some momentum. Anyway, these two pictures aren't much, but there's a handful of sketches I did as concept art for the game. You can tell that I spent more time on some of them and less on others. I think a few of them turned out pretty cool, though, which is I guess the point of concept art.

Sprite Sheet

Here's my first sprite sheet. For those that don't know what this is, it's a compilation of all the sprites that go together so that there aren't multiple files. A game might use this by knowing what the coordinates of each frame are in order to render animations. This took quite a while to finish. It might be because there's too much detail or just that I haven't done this before. At any rate, I can relate to why making an entire game can take several years to complete.

If anyone wants to see these animated, I put them on my GIFs page.

More sprite creation

I decided to include a few images to kind of show my process when I can't figure out how to make a sprite right away. I started this process because I wasn't sure how to make a fore-shortened sword look good on a small scale, but it ended up being really helpful for the whole sprite. The first picture is a side view of this character. I couldn't figure out how to draw this as a sprite, so I drew it with the traditional style. I also couldn't figure out the hand, so I drew a close-up to get it right.

The second picture is a rough side view of the character that I was able to use as a reference when making the simple, pixel version. The sprites are based on a typical style, so this is helpful when the pixel version isn't obvious.

The last picture is the sprite, which is supposed to look similar to the second picture. Obviously, it's not identical. The colors also don't match the other sprites completely yet, so it's not ready to put into a sprite sheet for game use, but it's getting there.

Sprites

This is my first attempt at making sprites that can be used in a game. It's actually a lot harder and more time consuming than I originally thought. They're kind of small, but that's because it's drawn pixel by pixel. It also makes sense for something that might go into a mobile game. Also, this upcoming game provided some inspiration.

I also moved the animated GIF to the GIFs page since I'm not a fan of flashy stuff on the main page.

More concept art

Here's a few pieces of concept art for the game. You can tell that the background is the same for all these - thanks to layers. I also added color to the one with all of them so you can tell which is which. Although, putting everything in one picture kind of messed with the composition, so I don't know if I really like that one as much.

Cell Shading

This is one of the first pieces of concept art/character design for the game. It was also an experiment on how well I can cell shade, which is probably going to be the style for our game since that fits better for 2D. I think I understand the basics. For those that are interested, cell shading seems to work best with just 2 colors (not 3 like I originally thought for the base color, highlights, and shadows). You just have to know where to put the shadows. Anyway, I'm still learning, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.