Hey everyone! Haven't posted a process piece in a long time it seems. As you can probably see I've been trying alot of new ways to make images, though still trying to keep things stylistically similar. I recently bought Kyle T. Webster's Megapack Photoshop Brush Set and man are the incredible, painting is a blast with them. I had previously bought Shiyoon Kim's Inkbrush Set and used one of his brushes to do the line work in this image, it's wonderful to have both but if you're on a tight budget I'd just get the Megapack, it's about a hundred different brushes that include inking and all types of painting brushes. (click on their names to go to their websites, and click on the brush set names to go to their respective online stores)
So my thumbnail(above) really does look that bad, but I just wanted to get the composition and basic attitude down the minute I had the idea.
At the same time I drew the thumbnail I did tighter drawings of the faces and placed them on top of the thumbnail and shazam, you have a tighter thumbnail. I did actually trace over all this with line to get my tight drawing though I seem to have deleted that layer after it became irrelevant. I used it to get all of my shapes correctly, one the shapes were down I just drew with new line over them.
Backgrounds are important, they can be a whole career if you're really good at them so I didn't want to skimp. I got this idea when I was at a gas station so I searched online to find something I liked the look of to start from.
I wanted the background to feel like a matte painting and so...I painted, not the whole thing of course considering these characters are static.
Our baddies here. My mouth waters over those painted textures and edges.
Our heroes here with the inquiring alien, which actually was added as an afterthought, I didn't think of him in the thumbnail but as the piece progressed I knew the composition needed him there, and it made sense with their eye lines.
The finished flats without the top layer of atmosphere.
The atmosphere added, as well as some proposed dialogue. Hope it's helpful guys! TTYL