Promo Art for Steam, Part 3: The Guy... Or half of him, at least!

Time to keep on working with that promotional artwork! In this post, it's all about the guy. As with the girl, this part of the portrait was to begin with, pretty straight forward, doing line art, color blocking, then shading (as usual): 

Line Art

Color Blocking

Shading

Starting on highlights

Once I got to this point, however, things changed a bit. At one point, when showing the WIP below to the others, we realized that the guy wasn't looking as cool as we'd like. Teddy felt his pose was hard to read, and Fred thought it looked a bit stale.

The solution? Remake the guy completely:

New Sketch!

After already having put in a bunch of hours into something like this, it's easy to have an initial bad reaction to game changing feedback like this: you really wish they could have told you sooner, so you wouldn't have "wasted" as much time - BUT - this is all part of being a gamedev (or artist in general). There's nothing wrong with suddenly realizing that you don't like something, and sometimes it's just really hard to tell how you feel about something until it reaches a certain point of progress. 

Also - is the time you spend on something that gets thrown away really wasted? Is anything you create creatively ever a waste? For every line you draw, you gain experience, and as any true RPG fan knows, experience is never bad! :)

Either way, after playing around a bit more with the sketch above, we finally got to a piece of line art that we all agreed was way better:

So in the end, thanks to this decision the promotional art will look much better. Throwing away stuff is good sometimes!