Hi all, this week I finished illustrating the art for World 7 in Kana Quest. And I’m pretty pleased with the end result. So I thought I would go through each of the “work in progress” images and talk about the things I did.
So here we have stage one. I wanted this world to be based around yellows and reds but then balancing it with light blues as the contrast colours. I also try to centre each world around something different, and I hadn’t done Japanese shops yet so I started with the central theme of the world from there. A couple of small details I put in here is the convenience store says Konbi 2. The word for 2 in Japanese is “ni” and “konbi” doesn’t actually mean anything. But if you add them together to make “konbini”, you get the word for convenience store. And on the billboard above, it says “Wayward Strand Coming 2019”, along with a QR Code to their website. I’m putting in a reference to this game because the Art Director (Goldie Bartlett @GhostTownGoldie) helped me out a bunch when I first started working on Kana Quest, and I wanted to acknowledge the help she gave me beyond the credits. The final little detail here is the drive through restaurant is called Zukina and is blatantly ripping off Sukiya a popular Donburi chain in Japan.
Here’s the next stage. The biggest change here is the massive change of the colour pallet. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to have the yellows and blues contrasting, but the yellows I was previously using were too green, and thus they ended being complimentary with the blue. So I redid the pallet, grounding the shading with a nice warm purple which gives everything a beautiful looking away from a sunset sorta feel. Apart from a couple of small alterations these colours stayed the same until the end. And I feel as though, you should be fine with deciding to change your colour pallet if the current one isn’t working. Every time I’ve done so has resulted in much more striking scenes. Of course if you have too many colours doing so might be a bit tricky, so maybe stick to a few colours to start with, then change them as needed until you are happy and then use as many intermediary colours as you like.
Once I was happy with the foreground shops, and colour pallet I moved onto making the background buildings. I have a fair bit of trouble with things that are not in the foreground because you need include less detail, but because it’s pixel art, you need enough detail to properly convey what it is. And to be honest I don’t think I’ve mastered this yet. I probably included too much detail on these background buildings. Also a small quirk about how I make these scenes, because each layer is parallaxing (foreground layers scroll faster than background layers) I have to make sure that the art for the background buildings extends to the lowest point in the foreground shops, otherwise there will holes. But the result is a bunch of artwork that just isn’t seen 80% of the time.
Next up was completing the shading on the background buildings. There’s not a whole lot to say about this stage, its just a slightly more developed version of the previous image. Except that in this one, I’ve repeated the background buildings so they take up the whole screen. I do this to get a better idea of how it will look in game.
Next up is the foreground. This is the first time I’ve had an actual person in the foreground. I had people in the stalls in World 5 and some students in World 6. But noting this front and centre. The main reason is lack of courage. I started learning pixel art specifically for Kana Quest. But I finally stopped putting it off and did it. My process was as follows. Create a rough sketch of the outline of the character. Then clean up the lines so everything looks nice and neat. Then block in large areas of colour going over the previously created line art. Finally add in small areas of shading and detailing.
Last one! There are only two main changes here. Firstly I finished the sky to have the same dither effect used in all the other worlds, and then I gave my young boy a baseball cap. What team is it for you ask? Why, it’s a cap for the Hanshin Tigers: the team of choice in my area of Japan. I decided to give him the cap because he looked like a kid who’s a part of the baseball club at school, and thus would totally be all about his local team.
Fun fact about the Hanshin Tigers, they haven’t won in decades and its all because they got cursed by Colonel Sanders. And no, I’m not making this up. When they last won the championship, their supporters threw a Colonel Sanders statue into the river next to the stadium. Why? Because they thought it would be fun to find lookalikes of team members in the crowd, and then throwing them in the river in celebration. But the Hanshin Tigers had one American player. And they couldn’t find another westerner, so they just threw in a Colonel Sanders statue in instead of a fan. But the following years they went from being the champions to 18 years of ending in last or second last place. So years later they went in and pulled up the statue. But they only found the top half, and the Colonel’s hand was missing. But their performance improved a bit. So a few years later they went looking for the other half, and found it. Once again the team’s performance improved again. And they were now one of the better teams but they kept getting unlucky losses towards the end of the season. So there is a huge bounty on finding the missing left hand, but alas they are yet to find it. The found parts of the statue actually now rest inside KFC Japan’s headquarters.
Look upon the destroyer of Hanshin Tiger’s fan’s hopes and dreams.
Anyway, that’s all I got for this week. Until next time take care and have a great week!
Theodor's Work and Occasional Ramblings 