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I was blessed with the opportunity to work on the video game "Reversed Front: Bonfire". I have given Reversed Front its own page because this was such as unique project for me. I was tasked with both designing and painting environments to represent many of the territories within the game. Each environment had to be highly detailed and to represent the culture of each region; it was perhaps the most time-consuming effort of my career.
Reversed Front is Copyright ESC Taiwan
The Process: Early Development Sketches
The Process: Early Development Sketches
Early in the process, I produced many pages of rough ideation sketches to explore composition and design. I really had no idea what the world of Reversed Front was going to look like. These sketches show my early efforts to visualize some of the main territories, as well as specific elements that might appear within the game. Also, I was starting to think about broader questions of visual style/art direction, like how to develop a cohesive visual style that would work throughout the game.
My earliest sketches were too rural, and I realized that Reversed Front needed to be much more urban, featuring complex cityscapes with heavy emphasis on architecture. Also, I confess, I misunderstood the "Asian Steampunk" aesthetic, and had to learn how to integrate gears and gadgetry throughout the environment. You can see how the final images grew in complexity compared to the early sketches.
Developing Tibet from Sketch to Finish
Developing Tibet from Sketch to Finish
As an example of my working process, I show the steps I took to create Tibet. I started with a series of rough sketches, which progressively became more specific. These sketches started on my iPad, using Procreate. I like the iPad for rough concept sketches, and then I turn to my Wacom Cintiq with Photoshop or Painter for the finished art. For drawing or sketching, I use a brush tool that gives a thick/thin line (just like a brush pen), and I start with a blue color which reminds me of how I used to work in pre-digital days.
After the concept sketch was approved, I developed a full size drawing in blue line, where I took time to carefully construct everything. The blue-line drawing was further refined/redrawn in black, using a Photoshop brush that gives the effect of a brush-pen. I refer to this stage as "inking", since it reminds of comic book days when we drew in blue pencil and then finished in black ink. After the ink stage, I created a full value tonal rendering, which I refer to as "under-painting". For me, the under-painting should answer all questions of light and shadow - it should be like a finished illustration in every respect minus color. You can compare this approach to classical oil painting technique, where the painter creates a full-value under-painting, over which layers of color are glazed and built up to create the finished painting.
I followed this process for almost every environment in this series. The galleries below show the line drawings and the tonal renderings for each environment.
A Gallery of Line Drawings
A Gallery of Line Drawings
A Gallery of Tonal Renderings
A Gallery of Tonal Renderings
Finally, here is a trailer for the video game on YouTube. Nearly every background seen in the trailer was designed and painted by me.
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