…Ahem, sorry Outkast reference.

Well kids, I’ve had an interesting week.  How about everybody else?

I didn’t have much time to get around to working on Cole, but when I did I was able to put in a great deal of work.  We stopped last week while I was still working on finishing the lineart inside of illustrator.  I hadn’t even touched Photoshop line-editing and coloring yet.  It was all still a bit rough around the edges, literally.

Well, I decided to play around with the lines a deal more by editing the various line-weights by selecting the major parts since, my design process usually involves larger body parts editable for easy line access.  Once I was finished with that, I exported it into a PSD file at around 500 dpi.  I like my work “XBOX huge.”  It allows me to get all up in there nice and deep.  Yeah, I said it.  Once I exported the lineart, I popped it into Photoshop and began cleaning up some of the lines, erasing various extra lines that I didn’t want inside of the piece and trimming down lines that were essentially creating tangents that were obscuring the overall image.  The result was below:

If you look closely, there were some subtle changes to the original lineart as  suggested.  I gave Cole a grimmace instead of the weaker smug appearance.  I also placed the line-art onto a blue background in the preparation for adding flat colors.  I used the blue background because that blue would be the main color I wouldn’t be using for anything else and incase I leave holes in the image, the blue allows any of them to been seen ensuring that I fill all if not most of the line-art with color.  I’ve been doing it for years, and it keeps things tidy.

After I laid the lines down, it was time to lay down the flat colors.  Since most of the colors Cole was wearing were either CG images or heavily post-processed imagery, I found it a tad bit difficult to get the colors of Cole’s outfit.  I figure I did a well enough job.

Once I laid the flat colors down, I had to take a break from it for a while.  A decent amount of work goes into popping the colors into place, and believe me the Paint Bucket DOES NOT work as well as one would imagine.  Upon my return I began to insert highlights and shadows via the Photoshop pen-tool.  The pen-tool within Photoshop work pretty much the same way as the Illustrator pen does.  Except its in Photoshop!  Whodathunkit!

The images above show the different statuses of the project when I was simply adding cel-shaded highlights and shadows to it via the aforementioned pen-tool.  Some of the shadows I simply drew in by stylus and airbrush.  My main concern was placing the right amount of lighting without drowing the image colors out or making things look outlandish.

Once I finished the highlights and shadows.  The fun part arrived.  That really wasn’t all that fun.  Wait, I take that back it wasn’t all that bad at all.  I decided to add some modest lightning effects around Cole’s arms and waist in the post process.  Since I don’t really have the process images for that part since it was on the fly, I was actually very afraid to try it at first, I’ve got the final images down below for what I churned out.

One image I added a blue filter in front of everything, and I sort of enjoyed how it turned out.  The image below is the image unfiltered.  I would upload larger images so you could attempt to appreciate the detail that went into what I did, however WordPress hates freedom, and promotes terrorism and doesn’t accept files of a specific size at the moment, I’ll probably end up offlinking the files to my site after a while in case anyone was interested.

Sorry to keep this so short kids, but Daddy General’s got business to attend to.  I’ll catch you kids next week!

Out.

I’ve always had a huge fascination with video games that I felt had insanely engrossing storylines with a metric fecal-matter-ton of background content.  Also, if there isn’t a whole lot of cheesy fan-art based on the game that I enjoy, I might be inspired to crank something out.  A few months ago, some of my online art friends were discussing old-school PC games.  Eventually we all got around to talking about space simulators, namely:

For those that aren’t familar with the series, it takes place in the year 2654, twenty years into a galactic war between the Terran Confederation the warrior cat-like race called the Kilrathi.  You play the role of a promising young pilot (Officially named Christopher Blair, when Mark Hamill takes the role in the live-action sequels) that is recently assigned aboard one of the front line fleet carriers called the Tiger’s Claw.

The man, the myth, the eventual Savior of the Confederation, Totally epic.

The game was among the first of its time to use a “gameflow” system that would allow you to progress in the game even if you failed certain objectives within a mission.  However constant failure didn’t come without its price.  Wing Commander’s storyline actually had dead-ends where if your progress was poor enough yet not resulting in your death or capture at the hands of the Kilrathi, the war would inevitably take an obvious turn for the worse resulting in the Confedations utter defeat.

21 shots and floating plasteel coffins, dude.

Honestly, I could talk about this series for hours upon hours, and still not explain how in depth its storyline had become with the various mass-media tie-ins.  The basis of my project for this week is a discussion about how we’ve planned to create a story about another group of pilots living throughout the entire series.  The Wing Commander series timeline easily covers a span of about thirty years from the first Wing Commander title to the fifth and final game, Wing Commander: Prophecy.  Now, I’m not even including all of the spinoff games that were released such as Wing Commander: Armada, Privateer or Privateer 2.

The story we’re creating starts around the same time the main character, Christopher Blair, starts his career aboard the Tiger’s Claw in 2654.  Our story is about a whole new squadron aboard the Fleet Carrier TCS Tiburon.  They are The Seraph Sqaudron.  The Tiburon returns to Earth after a long stint of front line duty only to be reassigned to the rear of the Third Fleet (The biggest, baddest portion of the Terran Navy.)  The story focuses on pilot 2nd Lieutenant Jackson Grieves, who has yet to earn his callsign and is assigned to the Tiburon after his old carrier, the TCS Lincoln was sabotaged and eventually destroyed by human Kilrathi-sympathizers, later identified as the Mandarins in 2655.

I’ve gone on waaaay too much about the story thus far, but we’re still all writing out all of the character bios and details linking them to either key portions of the war that is portrayed in the video games, or information in the timelines.  One of the characters the guys have let me work on is one Douglas Castor.  Callsign: Deathwish.  Now before you go all sippin’ on some haterade on me about his callsign, it does have a meaning: (If you don’t care, just skip the next paragraph.)

The Castor family has military legacy.  Douglas family is born and bred through the military.  His father, Henry Castor, was killed during one of the initial battles with the Kilrathi on the planet McAuliffe in 2634 at the start of the war.  His mother Agatha Castor was a communications officer aboard one of the vessels that was to resupply troops at a clinch point at the Battle of Repleetah.  Douglas had four brothers that all died in various branches of the military throughout the war.  Douglas’ youngest brother, Phillip was captured by the Kilrathi during a Marine incursion into Kilrathi territory.  His execution was aired over Kilrathi propoganda broadcasts to the Terran colonies.  Douglas avoided his military heritage by playing in a band in dive bars throughout New Detroit in the Gemini Sector.  He found out about his brother’s death and realized he had no family left.  They had all died at the hands of the Kilrathi.  Against his previous beliefs, he ended up applying to the Terran Academy’s Flight school.  When he graduated, he ran into a number of people that had served with various members of his family.  They all told him he must have some sort of death wish to follow his family into the war.  There you go, that’s how he earned his callsign, Deathwish.

Alright enough with the rambling, and onto the first piece of concept art the guys let me show off.

This is a VERY-rough concept head shot of Douglas Castor with and without his flight helmet on.  The idea of the character was that he was originally supposed to have the perma-facial-scruff thing kickin’, but some of the guys felt that he should slowly begin to burn out during the series and start growing some facial scruff later on.  The guys agreed to this design for now and I’ll probably have some character turnarounds in about a week or two.  The process for this, I feel, is fairly simple, as the piece isn’t insanely complicated in terms of design.  The lines were light and they guys wanted a basic design, simple, but recognizeable and easy to recreate down the road.  I pretty much sketched out this on paper first, scanned the image in and digitally inked via Illustrator.  Afterwards I smoothed out and edited more lines with a rasterized version of the Illustrator image in Photoshop, also proceeding to color the image in there as well with the handy dandy pen tool.  Sadly, I didn’t really have a need for my tablet since I wasn’t doing anything that required the amount of precision the tablet provides.

Where we think we’re going with the story is something that might be along the lines of a reoccurring webcomic, or if the animators can get off of their asses and work on it as some sort of a flash animation.  I think that’s kinda rockstar at the moment, so I’d totally stick with a webcomic if the decision were solely up to me.

Anyway, I’m my own worst critic, and I’m personally not too pleased with the results of the first concept but, that’s why it’s a concept.  I’m probably going to convince the group to play around with some other ideas I have instead.

So if there are parts that simply don’t make sense, I apologize.  I’ve been up way longer than I should be and I’m running on little sleep.

Alright, it’s like super late/early, and I’ve gotta get my ass to mars bed.

Seacrest, out.