X Rebellion - Production Diary

Production Diary

Paris (shinobi)

For my first concept art I drew the shinobi that I modeled after myself, briefly looking at different photos of myself on Facebook to recap my mind of my facial features, then I drew a quick draft using the brush tool (deleting and blurrign cerrtain lines); the colour was black and the size was 2 pixels.

Once I had a draft ready I looked to a earlier image I had drawn when I was creating my mood boards, that had a design of the armour I wanted to put on my shinobi concept. Considering a bit of a redesign, I continued to copy the torso armour and gauntlets, the scarf and the open apron at the waist however I decided not the keep and instead kept the turtleneck balaclava I drew in the draft and replaced the apron with a sash that I decided I would later colour crimson, until then though I concentrated on colouring everything else.

 

After laying down the flat colours on different layers, I then began to think about tone and shading. First I started on the skin for my arms, drawing in a darker brown the definition for the muscles, so the new layer wouldn't cover the outlines I manipulated the blending options to Multiply which black lines are clearly visible through. Taking into account the images I had looked at whilst research anatomy I continued to shade in a way that would make my arms like more defined. After defining the muscles I moved onto defining the torso armour and looked back to my original design of it for reference on where I create depth through darker and lighter tones. This entire time process was done using the standard brush tool at larger size, 25 - 70 pixels (varying for different areas).

On the left is after adding darker tones to the arms and beginning to add lighter tones to the torso. On the right the result after finishing the lighter and darker tones. By the time I had finished the tones, there were over 20 different layers. After completing the dark and light tones I decided to redraw the outline this time covering every detail, once I was happy about that I finally drew the crimson sash around my waist, colouring it and repeating the dark and light tone process on it. Soon after finishing the sash I was happy with everything I had done so far and all that was left was to draw blood and battle damage onto my shinobi, this blood was drawn using the brush tool at around 3 pixels wide, then I used the add noise filter and gausian blurred it to give the impressions of fleshy wounds underneath. Next was to blend the layer of blood onto me but the multiply tool made it too dark, at first I tried to lower the opacity but the didn't seem as lively and vibrant so instead I trial and errored other blending options, eventually landing on Colour Burn with went perfectly with the blood. Here's the results...

Here is the finished Shinobi, ready to have a backdrop  added to it.

In the interest of saving time, and for I was already quite proud of this scenery piece, I decided to use the City Ruins image I created for my 2D Game Maker game, entitled "City Escape". Initially adding my concept to the City Ruions was a problem because the edges were messy and the blending options didn't help so I decided to create a duplicate of my concept, changes the light and dark levels and dragged the marker all the way to white, making that entire layer white, then I used the gausian blur again to smooth of the lines creating a nice little glow effect behind my ninja. Just before declaring the concpet complete I had to sudden urge to render clouds, this I am glad I did because after lowering the opacity and applying the darken blend, the clouds blending in perfectly as smokescreens, which in my opinion made the city look a lot more vacant and ruined.

Here is the final concept for my Shinobi, the revolutionary Paris.

Tsubaki (kunoichi)

The next concept art piece for X Rebellion is the kunoichi (which means female ninja), Tsubaki. Unlike with my first piece I didn't want to use photos of myself to use as reference because I don't have a feminine physique, so I decided to find images of women to use as reference. Before I actually started gathering reference images of the female form, I remembered my research and how during it I looked a bit into the Dead or Alive fighting games series, the fifth installment to be clear; my reason for this is because the game allows you to take photos of recorded battled and considering the similar fighting styles to what I had planned for my ninja, this was perfect for reference images of not only the female form but dynamic poses too. Here are a few examples of the shots I grabbed...



After using my references I began to draft the outline for Tsubaki. Just like with the last piece I used a standard 2 pixel brush. For this piece I drafted different parts of the body on different layers, the actual body I used thin 2 pixels outlines, the hair I used 5 pixel wide outlines (coloured white), and for the armour and clothing I used much thicker (grey) outlines around 15 - 20 pixels wide.

AS always the next step is the apply flat colour, I decided to get the armour out of the way first however because I got so caught up in doing the armour, I got ahead of myself and I started to add light and dark tones to it before adding flat colour to the entire image, I eventually ended up doing this for each body part. Note that on the armour outline the breast size seems like it has been reduced but if you look under the left arm a "sarashi" can be seen, these are bandages used by females to disguise their feminine figure, either to impersonate a man or in this case to become more streamline and aerodynamic, because the reference images I used were from Dead or Alive, I ended up making Tsubaki incredibly voluptuous which is actually less practical in battle.

 

Since making my first final piece, I had brushed up even more on anatomy and muscle definition, and I believe that the difference is clearly visibly between the above image on the right and the Shinobi concept piece. Although the same technique was used to create the definition in her arms, many more subtle layers were used for shading; by subtle I mean each layer used the same colour but had the Multiply blending option applied to it, that option make the current layer a lot darker so I manipulated the opacity so each new layer was only slight darker than the last. which worked out great.

To create somewhat realistic looking hair, I drew many different strands of hair on different layers and blend them using both the Multiply blending option (for darker strands) and Screen option (for lighter strands).

After finished the hair I moved onto the mesh sleeves and gauntlets. For the mesh sleeves I had to use a similar method of shading  as for the arms because I wanted the same muscle definition in the arms to appear through the mesh, on top on this I wanted to show that each crossing strand on the mesh are shiny and so I used another similar technique; I used the same technique as I did for the hair strands and mixed different blending options to make certain strands stand out. The gauntlets I coloured just as I coloured the armour, taking lighting into account, the light coming from the left, meaning the shadows are stronger on the right.

Just like the last piece once I finished coloured I redrew an outline and my Kunoichi was complete.

I believe the outline gives my characters a much more "anime-like" look to them. Which is exactly the look I'm going for in my conceptual art.

Although Tsubaki is now complete I for awhile felt like this piece was missing something and so I left it to move onto my weapon concept. When I finally came back to this image I realized what I could add to this piece.

I decided apply a pencil sketch technique I learnt from playing with filters on Microsoft word and blending them with the original images on Photoshop. In addition to that I decided to add less detailed drafts of Tsubaki, I made them much smaller as not to drawn too much attention away from the true final piece. In the three drafts that I drew I wanted to depict: Sexuality, Grace and Technique. Valuable virtues for a kunoichi.