- PROCESS -

As mentioned in the ABOUT section, while this project is living in a virtual world for the time being, great attention has been placed on giving the project and all assets an actual, real world, tangible and tactile feel. All assets for the this project have been hand drawn, scanned, and “painted” digitally, to reach the final image. An immense amount of time has been spent incorporating actual textures into almost all assets. Most notably, in keeping with the look of traditional UKIYO-E woodblock prints from various periods in Japanese history, the backgrounds have been painted and distressed in such a way, as to giving each piece the look of a woodblock print worn over time. All of these characteristics combined, this project presents very distinct and unique visuals, unlike anything else seen in the space to date. Below is an outline of the process of how all of the final assets were created. Enjoy.

Step 1: Sketch

Everything starts out with pencil and paper.

Step 2: Final drawing and shading

Once the sketch is refined, a final ballpoint pen drawing is created. Linework is added and the asset is fully shaded by hand in pen. This may be looked at as completely unconventional and labor intensive(it is), however, constructing and completing the art in this technique lends to its overall “hand” feel and look.

Step 3: Scan and Clean

Once the ballpoint pen drawing is complete, it is scanned into Photoshop, cleaned up, separated and saved as its own asset file. Over 100 individual asset drawings were completed for this project. each going thru this exact process.

Step 4: Painting and layering textures:

As mentioned above, an immense amount of time and energy was spent giving each asset a real world, tangible and tactile feel. Many types of textures were used for all assets, and lots of experimenting was done to reach different affects for them. Wood grains, pitted metals, fabrics, rope, straw and many others were used to reach the final look.

Step 5: Finalizing the asset

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