Grid Pix - Flat colour

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Mon, 18 Feb 2019

Here I dumped the background buildings, and those on the horizon (thank goodness for drawing everything on separate layers), and added the flat colours for all the shapes.

The two borders represent where the art could be cropped. The inner border was the actual game cover itself. I always draw a fair bit extra around the final image to allow re-positioning of elements at the end if necessary, or for bleed when being printed. There was a possibility of this being printed as a poster as well as a cover, so I wanted a bit extra to make the poster look more special than the cover. The bands at the side were wider because the cover would also wrap around the spine of the box, so the shaded area on the left hand side would be printed as the spine. The shaded area on the right hand side would not be used, but I drew it in for symmetry as the distortion effects I was using were based around the centre of the image. I didn’t need to draw the extra on the right, but I figured I would be glad it was there if it was ever reprinted at a different size.

The flat colour stage is by far the most tedious and boring part of the process. Before I’d even decided on any colours, I had to colour in every different ‘shape’ in the pyramid (every different face of every block) with a different colour, so that I could be able to ‘select’ that shape with the magic wand tool later, and recolour or shade that area easily and quickly.

The flat shapes took ages, then actually colouring in the blocks with the shades I wanted was quick and easy.

I switched to Photoshop at this point, as I’m much more comfortable using the gradient and layer effect tools in Photoshop to colour and shade, and to mess about with resizing and colour modes for the final version. Although generally I’m trying to move away from Photoshop as I don’t want to use rented software.

» Ste's Illustration Process Blog

Tags: process, gridpix, cover, drawing, photoshop, colour

Follow up post: Grid Pix - Finished!

Predecessor post: Grid Pix - Inks #2

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