Behind the Curtain: The Art of The Triune Legacy

I always want to know how an image is made when I see one. It drives me crazy when the medium is listed only as “acrylic” when it is acrylic medium but its through a frickin’ airbrush! Ai! It is a completely different situation then! In any case, neither were used on the art here. I thought I might let you in on the techniques used to create the illustrations in the Core Book and on this site.

To start, I use smooth heavy weight Bristol paper and do a soft sketch that is fairly accurate to what the finished illustration should look like. For this I use a mechanical pencil. The sketch has no shading, and is only a basic outline. I make the sketch as faint and basic as I can because I don’t want it to show through on the finished illustration.

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Secondly, I go over the illustration again with a black watercolor pencil, outlining and shading it. This illustration has a pentagram that I want to have in releaf [sic], so I drew that in with a white colored pencil, pressing as hard as I could without damaging the paper. Tape the piece onto my drawing board and put ‘er on the easel and we’re ready for the next step.

Next up, water. The watercolor pencil is nice and dark like charcoal, but I wanted something more drippy and gritty with really intense shadow and light contrast. So out comes the sumi brush with water and I go over the watercolor pencil being attentive to what direction I want the watercolor pencil to bleed. For areas receding into space I create soft lines that mesh with the background, for areas coming forward I keep sharper edges. If you want to try this technique you probably want to try a smaller brush for the detailed areas. I’m lazy and don’t like to switch tools too much so I use the big bulky sumi brush for everything but very carefully.

Notice how I added a little bit of shading to the hair with just the pigment from the watercolor pencil that had built up on the brush. Also softer edges on the right side which is farther away and will be sinking into shadow. After the water is done I let ‘er dry.

Then it’s time to pour the angst on! Or ink. Or soul fluid of Aarons darkness. Bahahaha! Of course, dealing with liquid angst is pretty messy and tricky. In fact, this is the hard part because it needs to be done as quickly as possible and as accurately as possible. I totally botched the accurate part. I don’t use watercolor paper because it is made to have liquids stay on the surface and then it would have to be level as apposed to horizontal. When I draw on Bristol it’s a good combination of absorbent, but not too much so part of it stays on the surface of the illustration so that the ink can bleed and drip if I want it too.

Quick like a bunny, I put water only on the areas that I want to be shaded. Then with another sumi brush I put some watered down sumi ink onto the area that has water over it. Since there is already water there this creates loose edges and ink bleed. Sometimes I’ll go back in with the water and move things around a little, but honestly, getting ink on my water brush is just downright dirty. For the areas with the white colored pencil I used to create the releaf [sic] effect, I added water to that area, carefully! Quickly! And then put the ink on, quickly! Before the ink has a chance to be absorbed underneath the waxy colored pencil I rub it off real quick with a cotton rag. The ink that was beading up on the surface of the colored pencil is easily brushed off and TA DA! I get to smear the crap out of the hand. Damnit… Screwed up there.

To give you an idea of how fast that has to be done it probably takes me two or three minutes to put the ink down on most of the illustrations. Usually I have one of the brushes between my teeth so I don’t have to set them down.

Next, we scan it into the computron! And I touch it up a little to clean up my ink smear on the hand, and increase the contrast. Then I send it to Jan, who increases the contrast more, because I’m a little spineless when it comes to getting my dark on. He also touches things up a bit and smooths out the pixels and whatnot. He makes everything look prettier and pro.

So that’s it! Too long and drawn out for simple illustrations, but this is my obsession. Or one of them. Happy mess making!

Seb is the Art Director of The Triune Legacy, and is responsible for the look and feel of the game. Find out more about Seb and the rest of The Triune Legacy Team. This Staff Blog entry was posted on August 11th, 2009.