Dead on Time#6.. just in time!

Hello!

After a week and a bit of sick kids, hospital visits and little sleep I’ve finally wrestled the ‘Dead on Time’ game cover into submission!(with thanks to Sanja for running interference with the kids this afternoon!)

It’s been a fun painting to do with the last few elements falling into place quickly (who’d have thought painting rocky mesas and cliffs would be so much fun?)

It’s still pending approval from Paul of course, and the text is tentative depending on what the publisher wants to stick in there.

I was wondering what to do about the aliens as retro game aliens tended to be pretty garish colour wise. This was so they’d stick out from game backgrounds, but also because of the limited ability of old machines to display many colours at once. In the real world it’s rare for large animals and machines to be really brightly coloured, so they tend to read as small or unrealistic.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to combine the bright colours with something I had to sell as ‘real’ until Gabby brought in a beetle from the back yard.

It’s a Christmas Beetle. The beetle appears to be either Red or Green depending upon your viewing angle and the angle of the light hitting it. So I decided to follow that effect for my greebly aliens, though it’s more suggested than over the top.

I think it also suggests ‘other worldly’ technology… ooerr!

I’ve got a couple of other gigs coming up that are quite different. I should be able to show one of them but the other is hush hush for now!

Once again, feel free to comment, abuse, laugh at or otherwise make your mark…

Matt

BTW: I’ve got a couple of back logged bits of concept art which deserve an airing as well.

I’ve updated the Dead on Time image with what I’m hoping is an embedded colour profile which will give a much richer image, not the poo-brown version I originally posted.

Dead on Time #5 (The Saga Continues)

Happy Australia Day and here I am with another update to the ‘Dead on Time’ Game Cover!

Things have progressed well if somewhat slowly! After perusing some more reference and taking a good look at how people successfully paint jet fighters I made some changes to my approach.

Because the jet is much more ‘in your face’ I’ve ended up rendering more detail and generally tightening things up more. I’ve got a few more details to add as well as a couple of corrections before I can move on to the aliens and background.

Feel free to comment, critique etc.

The next update will be delayed as I’ve got some freelance animation work. I’m doing some frame by frame animation in Flash/Photoshop/After Effects, so that’ll be a change of scene for me from 3D and much of the Flash work I’ve done. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post the results here for several reasons, the nature of what I’m animating being one of them. (there might be children watching!)

Matt

Dead on Time WIP#3 (I am an Eeeeeeeeediot!)

EEDIOT! Of course I launched into this image in a typical gung-ho fashion and now I’m paying for it!

I decided the perspective would be easier if I actually had an idea what a super duper futuristic jet was supposed to look like! I know, basic stuff huh!?

So I did some rough sketching to at least get a silhouette  of a top down view based loosely on the game itself and some reference images of fighter planes I found on the net. Well Duh!

Here’s the result, it’s all pretty loose still and I want to keep it that way.

There was the other little matter of the final aspect ratio of the image needing to match the cover of the case! Ahem.

I’ve had fun erasing parts of the plane back to expose the ground colour too.

Still not totally happy, the fighter is looking like a static brick. Things might change!

The landscape is coming a bit easier, really just chucking in rock formations from some reference material. Nice to play with some blues in amongst all that orange rock too.

I’m a little concerned with output from Photoshop. Images that look fine in PS come out with more contrast when displayed in browsers etc. Gamma correction settings or something perhaps?

Hopefully I’ll get another update done before I go on holiday.