Creating Promotional Art for Destony

From a sketch to a digital art piece

When setting out to create a game poster, in depth of research needs to be done in order to decide exactly what you are trying to execute with your design. 

After researching games that i felt had a similar feel to the game I was developing, I came across a FEZ poster which I felt really embodied what my game was about. An exploring positive character with an adventure as well as a mission. 

This is the FEZ poster which was the main inspiration for my poster, it was quite a coincidence that so many aspects of this certain poster matched my game. 

Here is the sketch that I produced after some thinking about the game environment and the positioning of the objects. 

Digital Development

I created the poster in Photoshop, this is the tool I usually use when I paint a digital image. 

I first lay out the scanned sketch in the background and lower the opacity so that I can actually see what I am drawing on top.

This was actually the last step, fitting in the appropriate font, this actually took me a long time as I couldn't quite find one that fitted so I ended up have to customize a font.

The initial painting phase always starts with the main focal point in the picture, in this picture, it happens to be the main character. This painting is done with a rounded paintbrush and using a wacom fun and touch tablet.

After the main character is done, I usually move onto the enemies and other characters within the game. I used the shift button to create the straight lines for the boxes.

I also added a glow around the white box which is done with the layer effects and glow function and can be adjusted so it doesn't look as tacky.

Finally, the last step was to do the background which consisted of filling it up with clouds and the two colored platforms. The background was a gradient made and adjusted with the gradient tool and the clouds and ground were all painted. 

Final Image

My Thoughts

The final result was more than I expected when I first set out to produce this piece of art. I was fairly surprise by how much it pops out from the screen due to the vibrant use of colours. It took a fair while to create although was certainly a worthwhile investment. I feel that it appropriately displays a positive stream of energy which my game will have when collecting the light boxes, although there is also room for improvement.

Pros:

• The colours pop out in vibrancy due to the strong use of colours which liven up the piece.
• The colours also compliment each other well. The purple of the background and the yellow of the light box, as well as the main title and the dark boxes also correlate.
• The text also pops out due to the glow behind  it and the black mist also brings it out. 
• The white box looks innocent, almost as if it was a glowing deity which was the intended look.
• It is quite a fairly eye catching poster. 

Cons:

• There are not enough dark blocks in the image, they somewhat seems bare and empty.
• There could possibly be an inconsistency in the art style comparing the characters with the background. The characters are in almost solid like colors  in a cartoon like way, whereas the actual background looks very painted. 
• The clouds were quite rushed and do not carry the same level of detail as the rest of the art piece.
• The colours could be seen as too vibrant, and could be seen as means of covering up a possible lack of creativity within the picture. 

Possible Improvements:

• There certainly could be more dark blocks on screen as inside the game the dark blocks significantly outnumber the light blocks.
• The background and the clouds could also be improved to suit the style of the characters.