WIPs & EXTREMELY lengthy reflections below, for my own reference!
I will preface this by saying this whole thing took too. Damn. Long. My main takeaway is that I need to figure out a way to streamline and speed up my art process, cause otherwise at this rate I won’t be able to finish every nrb member until like next year.
Also, if you’re not me and you’re reading this (hi!), I can be harsh on myself sometimes, but I’m very proud of everything I make still and my comments are purely for my own improvement. If you want to talk art, have potentially helpful advice, or just want to chat about my art in general, absolutely feel free to send an ask/dm!
Concept sketches (~2h x 3 + 2h = 8h). I mentioned this in another post already but my first mistake was made right here at the very beginning, where I dove straight into detailed designs without iteration. It’d probably be a lot smarter (and faster) to separate this into multiple stages like silhouette, layers, details, etc. and only keep 1-2 options to branch further. Another mistake that will come back to bite me is the fact that even after deciding to go with the first idea, I didn’t plan out the colours first before moving onto the final piece.
Anywho, I’m quite happy with how these turned out, but there were many design elements that I didn’t get to incorporate in the final piece (badge &/ holster from fiasco) or turned out too different in the final piece to connect them to the original reference (loser’s gun things (?) got turned into a radio, and engineer’s mask & hacker’s hood changed colour). To give myself some credit, going with no. 1 pretty much means fully leaning into the Fairmonts religious aesthetic anyways, so it wasn’t too disappointing.
Speaking of leaning into the religious theme, even though I really liked the idea of trying to turn a compass that looks like a model of the station into a weapon, I just couldn’t make it work. Luckily the Rule Book idea works as well in this case. When opened, it has a display on one side and a model of the station on another. In this au, Adam is the “voice of the station”. In the context of the half baked board game mechanics in my head, Adam has the highest Resonance stat and can almost directly commune with the station itself. The display constantly shows jumbled up readings based on vibrations and connections and Adam is the only one that can understand it, thereby gleaning information and essentially premonitions. As a weapon, the Rule Book is of course a “casting focus”.
Moving onto thumbnails (1h) and sketch (~3h?). Here is where I decide to let go of the mechanic/head of maintenance crew idea that I had and fully go in the direction of religious leader. Choosing the bottom right thumbnail, I decided after finishing a full sketch (of course) that I wanted to more explicitly frame him like a saint, with the window (halo), as well as having the book in one hand and two fingers up for the other like in common depictions of Christ. I’m actually pretty proud of coming up with this one!
While I’m here, let me get the rest of the religious imagery out of the way. The outfit including the sash around the waist of course mimicks a priest’s robe. The Rule Book (reference to nrb itself) is also a manual (sci-fi element of the au) and a gospel (religious). Adam’s code name, The Host, is also simultaneously a reference to nrb, a connection to the au (host server) and a religious thing (heavenly host, host of the Spirit, etc).
Here I also decided to include some environmental elements in the final piece. Moving forward I will most likely have to keep this consistent, hopefully my future self won’t hate me too much!
Character line art (~4h). Not much to speak about for this one, although I probably will choose a brush that isn’t transparent next time, for reasons that will be come clear soon.
Object line art & flats & black shading (~4h). Here I started to reference Hades’ style a lot more and just filling in blocks of shadow with black. It took a long time, since I wasn’t familiar with doing this, but the result looks pretty sci-fi adjacent somehow which I liked.
Aaand the colours. Right off the bat, it seemed like a double complementary situation, with red (priest’s sash) + yellow (Adam’s colour & Piston Fairmont) and indigo + green (hacker colour). The mask being orange was never going to work, but I kept on trying it because otherwise it wouldn’t look like it’s from Engineer Nemesis anymore. By the end, I had to change it to green, and the hood to red for clarity, which jeopardized both references. (I also somehow didnt realize that Adam’s eyes are greyish blue, not brown. Had to fix this later too.)
That being said, I think this is still comparably probably the best stage of this piece. From here on out I will suffer a lot due to my tendency to over complicate.
Almost final render (6h) sans design elements. Shading this was a horrible experience. I struggled a lot because I knew I wanted to do edge lighting, but I was also very new to the style, and couldn’t figure out how to incorporate reflective light or environmental light. I wasn’t even sure on whether or not I should put in midtones. I learned a lot, of course, but I also struggled a lot. Lesson learned: dont do edge lighting as your first piece in a new style !!
Although, to be fair, shading (and colours in general) normally isn’t my strong suit anyway. It’s really high time I did some studies on colour and lighting. Not like I’m actually gonna do it but I really should, at some point.
I also bullshitted the plastic and metal rendering and called it a day. I put this away at the end of the night but I knew I wasn’t done with it yet.
Completion (~4h). Sure enough, I had a lot of futzing left in me. I wanted the piece to look cohesive, and fiddled around endlessly with tone curves (seriously, I have sent >30 iterations to myself so I can check the colours over a phone screen as well as my computer which displays really desaturated colours for some reason). This is a bad habit I need to get rid of, since most of the iterations look almost the same in retrospect, but I focus too much on details and not the whole picture when I’m In It. I have the same problem with lineart, where I have to stop drawing the same line over and over again for 3 minutes. It’s not productive.
Also moving around the piece itself as well as the text chugged Big Time, since I had like >50 layers at that point. Eventually I had to just stop myself and call it a day.
The icon design mostly reflects an Angel (halo, wings) and the station itself (dodecagon of the core, solar power panels - I should mention btw that the three white squares will be the recurring symbol of NRB, based on the background of their previous set at Deaughts and the solar panels of the station in this AU). It also maybe looks a bit like a mic if you squint.
Phew! That’s it from me for this one. The total time taken is ~30h, which, as previously mentioned, is Way Too Fucking Long. I’m starting Tom’s design now, and hopefully what I learned doing this piece will speed the process for that one up at least a good amount.
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