I was asked recently in a forum post over at Touch Arcade, how I generated the artwork for the game. I thought I’d show some concepts and final artwork of ‘G’ and talk a little about the tools used.

This concept image shows the original intention for the art direction. All line work on paper, the only colour was going to be the blood.

This was also first concept sketch I did of G. The line work was drawn digitally in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet. For the paper effect I used a texture to make a pattern which could be used throughout the project – fill a layer with the paper pattern and set the layer blending to multiply.

I left G for a while to focus on the overall look of the game. Initial response to the black and white, line on paper, was that it wasn’t finished. Almost everyone asked if it would be coloured! Reluctantly I introduced some colour to the background. As you can imagine it didn’t remove the questions of colour, in fact it solidified the appearance of being half finished. In due course I went full colour and didn’t look back.

Back to G! After the initial design of the character I started to design the weapons. I sketched a lot of the weapons rather than go directly to digital. There wasn’t really a purpose to this, I just wanted some time away from the PC screen! When you make a mistake on paper and look for Ctrl-Z to undo it, you know you’ve spent far too long at the keyboard! I scanned in the sketches and traced over them in Photoshop to create clean line work.

For the final artwork, I wanted assets which could be used both for the in game characters and marketing material (although i did a fair bit of touch up on the in game assets at game res). For these final graphics I used background sketches as reference and built the artwork using default shapes and the pen tool, to create scalable graphics.

To get some of the outlines I used a ‘Stroke’ layer effect. In the image below his arm is made of 3 shapes on their own layers with the stroke effect. One for the red arm, grey elbow, and white hand. While this does need tweaking (size of the stroke effect) if you change the scale, it removes a lot of hassle. Probably worth saying at this point that I wouldn’t say Photoshop is the best tool for this process. Illustrator or other apps may be better suited, however I only have Photoshop!

So finally, in glorious colour, we have ‘G’.