I know it's been actually over a year since I posted here, because I ended up being very busy on my last year (I did pass and got my degree yippee) and also busy trying to get into a masters program (among other things, like surviving the current political hellscape...)
anyway so I did end up finishing Rana's redesign, as well as the other 3, as well as modelling her and Alies fully including a rig and textures, the latter being my final major project. They're not perfect (somehow both have too long of a chin...) but now I have models I can pose and light however I want so that's cool.
This "painting" (its more of a graphic design experiment, but I did paint for this) is inspired by the new Marathon (as well as the classic, which I started playing. A game from 1994 still holds surprisingly well) and its very distinct visual style. I don't play it so I can't say anything about the actual game, but the art made for it is instantly recognizable, and has this 90s sci fi vibe I absolutely love.
It had me thinking that Old Blood, the world where the vast majority of my characters live in, doesn't have that. Obviously the 90s aesthetic in Marathon wouldn't fit my stuff, but when I thought about what style would, I had an answer pretty quickly - brutalism.
Hence this "poster". This was a test in trying to convey the style of Old Blood with the brutalism poster style in mind. I don't think it necessarily succeeded here - I think I leaned too far away from what Old Blood is - but it is certainly more distinct than my previous stuff already, and I'm happy with that.
This is meant to be a sort of wanted poster for Rana (though they canonically wouldn't have a shot of his unmasked face but for the sake of the poster it's there).
For most of the filters I used a website called effect.app, it does leave a watermark but if you make the thing you need on the left you can avoid it. Anything else is from auto-actions on Clip Studio Paint (mostly for adding scan lines and chromatic aberration over everything in the end)
On the right is a painting I made from scratch for this, which ended up showing less details than I initially wanted just to fit with the rest of the piece. Here's the unedited version of that, as well as the filtered version I'll talk about in a bit:
This was the first time I painted her post-redesign, and I don't think I fully captured her features (underbite, 'lidded' eyes, the scars deforming her face) but he does look much more east-asian as he should so there's that.
The picture on the right here is the filtered version that is beneath the painting layer (it was set to 'screen' I think so it gives it that hologram/tv glow). Initially I planned to have these two combined, glitching into each other, but it wasn't working so I changed the whole composition.
The middle image is of the actual model! It has been heavily filtered and I painted over some parts to fit better with the proportions the painting had, but in the end you really can't tell I think.
The unedited image I worked off of looked like this:
I ended up changing where he looks so I had to repaint the scars obviously. Also stuff like the horns of the mask I like to have longer to get a stronger silhouette.
The left image is the wireframe of the model, an effect that would've been very annoying to get if I didn't have the model lol:
These two were given a gradient map and a bunch of filters I layered over each other to get the result I wanted.
The three small pics on the bottom row are of old drawings I made. Two are of Lykena the Goddess, because her design is unsettling enough without glitchy filters over it, and the middle is of part of a cloudy sky I painted a few years back (the full painting was also of Rana)
The text is pretty basic, Old Blood is obviously the name of the whole universe, and on the left is some random stuff to hint at the poster being a wanted poster. The NGB is the government in the megacity everyone lived in (the full meaning of the initials is literally "Noex Governmental Body", Noex being the name of the place)
On the right though, that's where I got the inspiration from classic Marathon. Without spoiling anything (if you ever want to play a game from over 30 years ago), the story is told almost exclusively through computer terminals, where you interact with an AI called Leela. Every previous terminal had texts from either Leela or the ship's logs, but one of them was different. It had a poem, about a woman stepping into an ashless fire, screaming as she tries to escape... Something. It stood at such contrast to the rest of the game so far, it was obviously important and I can't figure it out yet and it really made me latch onto it.
So I added something similar, that is clear to me since I know Rana's backstory like the palm of my hand, but to an outsider hopefully it seems mysterious.
I'm thinking of making a poster for each main character in OB but I can't make any promises since I'm also planning stuff for the other brainrot game blog (no I'm not telling you which game)
