Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Garrus Mass Effect cover process

As promised, here is an in depth process post for the Garrus Mass Effect cover.












Enjoy,
Mike


7 comments:

Scott Cohn said...

incredible, dude. you are KILLING it.

Mike Hawthorne said...

Thanks, Scott. I'm trying like hell to get better. Still a lot of ground to cover though.

Scott Cohn said...

that's the uphill battle, daily. thankfully we do so much work, we have ample opportunities. although, it does amaze me to see artists i saw 20 yrs ago with little to no improvement. i don't even know how that happens.

Mike Hawthorne said...

I think it's just more comfortable to be that way. I think that the idea for them is if you get good enough to get paid, and sometimes paid well, why push any more?

I feel for those kinds of guys.

MIke

Patrick said...

Question, when you did the background, did you lightbox the figure over it or some sort of overlay? Interesting to see what most might consider the backwards way to do this drawing.

Still, end result is tops. Love the coloring on this one too. Underrated.

Mike Hawthorne said...

Thanks!

The figure and background are two different pieces of art. Both were scanned then I drop the figure in front of the BG with Photoshop.

I know I'd be doing one large four cover wide piece of art, and didn't have the time to draw all four covers at once, so I quadrupled the wide of the art and drew one long background. This allowed me to be able to cut out the cover I need to ink at the time, drop the relevant figure in front, and print out a blueline to ink. Then I'd butte it against the last cover and made sure they linked up well.

Hope that makes sense.

Mike

Patrick said...

Absolutely. That is what it looked like you did, drop the main figure in later. Figuring lightboxing would be the odd choice after the background was done, it looked too "perfect". Not in a bad way, just saying, using a lightbox after the fact would have caused some tangent lines and such.

Cool process pieces as always!