Whew! Here’s my entry for Square Enix’s Tomb Raider Reborn contest. Took way to long but it was all worth it..
I used tons of custom brushes.. no photos.. its really hard but I learned a lot more by doing this the hard way.. XD
Also, I’m already one of the 25 finalists! Woohooo!
Video Process here:
WARNING: Too much Alt+Tabbing in the video… might make people nauseous
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SOME NOTES AND STUFF I LEARNED:
-Doing line art can be fun too… BUT.. don’t neglect your values! Make sure you’re values are planned out from the start. My mistake was focusing too much on the elements and not on the overall look of the painting. Since I finished the character first, this gave me a chance to adapt the background based on the character’s values. A good rule of thumb is to place light parts against dark areas and vice versa to generate contrast. You can see how the background is dark under the parts where Lara Croft is lit and vice versa.
-One major mistake I made earlier on was not balancing the pose correctly. This was pointed out by a fellow artist and friend who is really awesome with anatomy stuff. Check his stuff out here: http://allengeneta.deviantart.com/. Since Lara Croft’s right arm was raised, it didn’t make sense that her right leg was also raised. It’s like walking with both your right foot and arm being raised at the same time. Glad I was able to fix this early on.
-I took my time to do a lot of research and I think it paid off. I watched a lot of Tomb Raider promotional videos and even some movie scenes with explosions just to get a good feel for what I’m aiming for. I also collected around 80 reference images for all the unfamiliar elements I had to draw. Anatomy is still an issue for me so I had to use a lot of references and some DAZ 3D assistance because I really wanted to get this looking correct since this was supposed to be a print.
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Thanks for watching!
Did this in around 25+hrs spread across two weeks.
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