All the OoPs and AIs and cast of characters from Control!
Eight months in the works. IT IS DONE.
This is now available as a print!
Enjoy a 2k version and close-ups and a walk through the entire process.
Click here to see a higher resolution file (2560 x 1097 px)
PART TWO is here!
A break! Or is it?
"Just talk to them, kid"
Busy hands (AI 77-KE)
Tourists and The Old Guard
Headaches but no heartache
Sorry guys, it was me, I vandalized the Eagle LTD. Train Car! (legal loophole so the Service Weapon is included)
It's just a video game, right? :)))
THE PROCESS
This illustration is one of many I've done for WankerNumber9. Her idea for this one was something along the lines of "La Grande Jatte" with characters from Control and Altered Items. How many Altered Items, you may ask? It was unspecified.
So, on March 9th I sit down and sketch this:
This is intended to work as a "map" rather than a representation of what's to come, a first approach to an angle that would allow me to answer the question "How many Altered Items?" - the answer: All of them :)
This rough sketch is good enough so I can start the next step, throwing everything into Blende: Game models, human models posed in DAZ Studio, and the always trusty grid textured rectangles.
The first two images are about ten days apart. The middle image is when everything clicked for me and I decided that yes, I can pull this one off. Bottom image is the very first attempt at visualizing the definitive composition.
This may be a weird thing to say. But I do not like drawing. That part where as an artist I'm supposed to construct things from scratch and figure out perspective by myself? Nah! So here in comes a savior: Toonkit for Cycles, a Blender plugin.
Its lineart shader is a time saver, because now I have a very rough sketch which is good enough to start testing values and color.
So, mid April I get this:
And a day later I have the first approach to values:
The bottom image are some thoughts analyzing the composition: Too symmetrical, too many straight parallel lines, nothing to guide the eye anywhere interesting. It was then time to decide which would be the focus areas and how I'd try guide the eye to them.
So after a week or two of looking at it with analytical eyes, I let it rest for about two weeks, revisiting the image in my mind while swimming and visualizing changes in my head while digging holes and doing gardening. The result:
The goal at this point is to keep the composition readable at a small size. Using Toonkit's celshading shader, I looked for a simple abstract composition. Hence, the triangle-like shape pointing from the left towards what would be Ahti and Dylan, and Jesse and Emily. The "Pillars" pointing to them as well but from above. Then it follows to break that basic geometric shapes with light planes, to start exploring the level of "noise" in each area.
Then, time for some fun! Exploring some detail but not much. Moving things around, mostly.
This is good enough to start exploring a color palette. Given the variety of objects and subjects, I was worried the color stage would be a problem to keep everything readable. But I shouldn't have, art direction is perfect in this game, the color palette makes itself. It's all greys and very few saturated accents, which makes it stupidly easy to point to focus areas with colors and different levels of saturation.
Now, that's a sketch! At this point only I've decided this is 100% feasible. And, once again, it's time to let it rest for about a week.
This time I'm trying to not play things in my head so I can have fresh new eyes to look at it. To find issues to improve, I go back to simple things: make it small and mirror it.
The two images on the top are the value sketches (no lineart), the middle two are a simplified version (Cutout filter set to 2-3 levels). On these I can see the bottom of the image is too symmetrical, so I tested breaking that symmetry on the bottom right corner. That approach didn't convince me, so I had to make it as simple as possible:
Now this looks better. Time to move to the most boring part: elaborating all the small "vignettes" and writing them down! A to-do list to guide me in the following days.
A few days spent tweaking the 3D scene and sketching over the lineart render, the first rough sketch is done:
And from there, over the course of a month, I begin to clean it up:
On June 22nd, I had finished the final sketch:
IT IS TIME TO PREPARE FOR PAINTNG
The very first thing: map those brushstrokes.
Once again, working on this stage as a map. The first brush strokes have to be big and this will map their direction.
Underpainting:
Still mapping things: keeping it to two values: light and shadow. The shape of light planes reigns over realism. And then, some very simple rendering to start separating every object and figure from the shadow/light planes, while always trying to keep it readable once the sketch layer is turned off:
The reason to use these colors for this underpaint layer is because once I start laying out the final brush strokes, some of this layer will still remain visible, there'll be less loss of saturation and it should give some (even if very) subtle richness to the dominant grey color scheme. This is also how I used to work with oil paints.
I also like to pretend I'm still an oil painter despite not touching actual paint in years and probably won't for many more until I get my own place and with a huge painting studio because goddamn those things smell and I need the walls to be the exact tone of neutral grey or it'll fuck up my perception of the pigments-
Made it to July. This is the first attempt at applying colors:
After some days letting it rest, I decided I had been too sloppy with my brush strokes, so I went back and repainted all the concrete, this time with more patience. Then, I proceeded to mask all the objects and figures, because NOW painting begins :D
Some contrast adjustments:
FUCK YEAH IT'S TIME TO HAVE FUN AND FINALLY START PAINTING FOR REAL
Except it was almost August and I had to finish my contribution for the FBCZine. So I didn't work on this illustration for the entirety of August.
Stop working on a piece this large for such a long stretch of time was me playing with fire. It's very easy for me to lose interest in a pending work if I take a long pause. But the rhythm with this one in the past months had been a great battleground to fight my impatience demons (and I've been on ADHD medication for the past two years), so the fight didn't seem impossible to win.
And I won >:D
September comes around, and I feel like playing with brushstrokes and explore textures.
Now it's time to reveal this file is HUGE.
35000 x 15000 pixels or
2.96 x 1.27 meters or
116 x 50 inches
And as you see, the version I've posted is MICROSCOPIC in comparison. Several times I wondered what was the point in such dimensions other than not seeing things pixelated once I zoom in. I usually work in big files just for that reason, and for the enjoyment only I will get upon seeing things this detailed this big. I never share the original files so no ever will see such small details in textures and so on.
Except this time, there's the chance this piece will be printed BIG. Therefore it won't be just me ogling at the textures and brushstrokes. May the chaotic fun of every character be also accompanied with the sensory noise of painting!
September goes on, and so do I. Focus and motivation hits hard, so for nearly ten days straight my routine has been nothing but: get up, shower/have breakfast/water plants, sit down to paint, have lunch and keep painting until it's dinner time. Up to six hours painting in total each day.
As a side note: I always keep four smaller windows open: greyscale and color and their mirrored versions. This helps to keep an eye on areas that may not be reading well.
In this case, it led me to do some further contrast adjustments to separate background planes by distance (atmospheric perspective, if you will).
At this point I was feeling weird. Because at a logical level I knew this illustration was bonkers already. But I had this nagging feeling it was still, somehow, empty.
I knew it could just be a matter of me spending months looking at it, impostor syndrome, etc. So I tried to ignore the feeling. Until I couldn't. So I got into the game just to look at it. To take in the concrete and carpets. And it hit me: Reflections. This piece wasn't empty but it was missing surface detail.
So, in Ahti's honor, I started cleaning those floors:
September 17th, this is what progress was looking like:
And from there, it was all smooth sailing. Just grunt work left to do. No more cerebral pondering and wondering and analyzing. It was all detailing, painting, material, contrast, etc.
October 8th:
The rest of October I spent not only painting but also making a few large changes here and there. And a month later, I was done.
Technically.
There's always the devil speaking "oh you could have added this or that, this interaction could've gone better if you did this or that."
"This is a painting, it's VERY easy to add a new thing or ten".
And I could have! I wanted to add Waldo as a visual gag since the very beginning, I wanted him on his knees, arms up with a few rangers pointing their guns at him, as if he were a most dangerous thing (he probably would be, considering this is the Oldest House anyways). But I didn't find room for him until last week!. Finding a place for the Ashtray Maze on the top right corner was hard enough too. I wish I could've found room for Salvador and Tommasi to complete the old guard. But I guess Darling showing enough skin for all of them will have to suffice.
I was satisfied enough with the final painting, and most importantly, so was the client.
All in all, this one was quite a journey. One day (maybe) I'll write down my thought process behind each interaction and list all the Altered Items and Objects of Power.
But in the meantime, I've got more work to do. So here, some fun stuffs:
While I was working on my piece for the FBCZine, the file got corrupted once, and I lost a whole day of work. Traumatizing event - for this one I made backups after every painting session:
And the Blender file? It is HUGE:
