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Description
A Mass Effect 3 commission for ~flatlinedreams .

My commission info is here.

This is the most complex painting I've ever done, but I wanted to push myself with a challenging piece. I budgeted extra time for that but between my own perfectionism and some real life issues cropping up, it took longer than I anticipated. The bright side is that I don't think I'll be forgetting that particular lesson in workflow and time-management any time soon.

Flatlinedreams was wonderfully patient with me, and provided a very detailed description of what he was after. An excerpt, since I think he put it better than I could:

"[...] The idea is that after the events of Mass Effect 3, Samara has decided to resign as a Justicar. The scene is supposed to symbolize Samara having her old armor in the display case so that she can remember her past, but she has moved on from that, and Shepard is there with her."

I couldn't find any existing reference photos to my satisfaction, and I wanted to get the lighting, perspective, and reflections right. What I ended up doing was teaching myself a little about Blender (a free, open-source 3d modelling program), grabbing some in-game models from the Mass Effect 3 (including Samara's unused gown from the citadel DLC!), and arranging (and rearranging...) them until I finally had a composition I was happy with. Game assets are pretty low-poly and look on the stiff side even with some work posing them, but as long as I used them for reference only and not a literal copy, I was golden. I took a lot of artistic liscence with Samara's gown in particular.

In a way, using 3d models like that is just a digital extension of using maquettes (small scale models) as a lighting reference. The real thing is always going to be better because of how complex light is, but the flexibility of modelling a reference in 3d is really handy. And much more convenient in my itty-bitty suite, where space to paint is at a premium, let alone sculpt!

(Can't say I have many glass domes around, either...)

All in all I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and I learned so much from doing a composition beyond my regular portrait work - much of which I couldn't have anticipated beforehand, but that's the stuff I probably needed to learn most!

Tools: Krita (and a little Blender , for lighting reference only) under Linux Mint 15 (KDE edition); Wacom Intuos4 4"x"6".

Samara, Shepard, and Mass Effect are all (c) Bioware, of course.

Description
A Mass Effect 3 commission for ~flatlinedreams .

My commission info is here.

This is the most complex painting I've ever done, but I wanted to push myself with a challenging piece. I budgeted extra time for that but between my own perfectionism and some real life issues cropping up, it took longer than I anticipated. The bright side is that I don't think I'll be forgetting that particular lesson in workflow and time-management any time soon.

Flatlinedreams was wonderfully patient with me, and provided a very detailed description of what he was after. An excerpt, since I think he put it better than I could:

"[...] The idea is that after the events of Mass Effect 3, Samara has decided to resign as a Justicar. The scene is supposed to symbolize Samara having her old armor in the display case so that she can remember her past, but she has moved on from that, and Shepard is there with her."

I couldn't find any existing reference photos to my satisfaction, and I wanted to get the lighting, perspective, and reflections right. What I ended up doing was teaching myself a little about Blender (a free, open-source 3d modelling program), grabbing some in-game models from the Mass Effect 3 (including Samara's unused gown from the citadel DLC!), and arranging (and rearranging...) them until I finally had a composition I was happy with. Game assets are pretty low-poly and look on the stiff side even with some work posing them, but as long as I used them for reference only and not a literal copy, I was golden. I took a lot of artistic liscence with Samara's gown in particular.

In a way, using 3d models like that is just a digital extension of using maquettes (small scale models) as a lighting reference. The real thing is always going to be better because of how complex light is, but the flexibility of modelling a reference in 3d is really handy. And much more convenient in my itty-bitty suite, where space to paint is at a premium, let alone sculpt!

(Can't say I have many glass domes around, either...)

All in all I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and I learned so much from doing a composition beyond my regular portrait work - much of which I couldn't have anticipated beforehand, but that's the stuff I probably needed to learn most!

Tools: Krita (and a little Blender , for lighting reference only) under Linux Mint 15 (KDE edition); Wacom Intuos4 4"x"6".

Samara, Shepard, and Mass Effect are all (c) Bioware, of course.