GameArt

First off, I'm fond of drawing and painting, but only just recently got into computer graphics.

This drawing was basically a test to try and put some tutorials and tips to use which I picked up here and there around the net. At the time I was playing for a CTF clan, and Ellusion as the title implies, was our clanleader and a good friend of mine. Ellusion had whipped up some nifty clanskins, and as each of the skins had individual traits like different faces and rank insignias, using the Quake2 model with the clanleader's skin seemed like a good setting for a portrait.

As I said before, my skills at using a computer for drawing was near to non-existent, so I had to rely on various how-to tutorials I found. From early on, I fancied Dhabih Eng's artwork and he was more or less the person who inspired me to get started on this.

The first step was to make the contours right, I'm not to handy with the mouse so I kept using the straight line tool to make rough-cuts of all the shapes. I used a white background with black lines. When the shape was right, I started adding color. Since I was using the paintbucket tool, all the different areas had to be closed with a solid line, so that the color would stay in that particular area. When I finished coloring, I started adding more straight lines, mostly black lines except for the black clothes of-course. Making the face was the hard part, It had to look natural at the same time you had to recognize the Quake2 model's shape and expression. It was a lot off trying and failing at this time. I made the basic contours of the eyes, eyebrows and nose with the line tool, and then used the smudge tool to smooth things out, dragging the colors together and making it look real. When the face was complete, the details of the bodyform was outlined with white lines on the black background, and then smudged out to add a feeling of light shining off the bodyarmor.

Everything was done with Adobe Photoshop 4.0 and took me about 12-15 hours of trial and error.