Creating Our Red String's illustrations (Patreon)

I've been thinking about sharing with you guys more of what goes on with the creation of ORS's illustrations. 

I follow the same basic process I already used with GGGB, but with this new project I made several changes to up the quality of the final product. I did everything myself in GGGB, and I had to cut a lot of corners, as you could clearly see. Thankfully, I just managed to make the art good enough to sustain the gaming experience I wanted to create. There a few drawing I really like in the old game, but it was very important for me to upgrade the presentation and quality of my project. I needed to invest.

With a more ambitious project in mind, delegating was an unavoidable step. Commissioning the number of full-color, hand drawn 2D illustrations I want to provide for each chapter of ORS would be incredibly expensive, so I knew I would still be in charge of drawing. But I could outsource the coloring of the drawings: that part of the process is really time-consuming, and I could find someone else to do it for me, and to do it way better. 

Anyways, this is the process I follow now, that you can see in these images: first I draw the line-work for the illustration, manually tracing over photo-reference for the pose and anatomy, imprinting my characters onto it. Not having to do the color work myself anymore, I can take more time with this step, making the drawing tighter and more refined, with cleaner and careful line-work. 

Then I send it to Lenadai so she can work with it. First she blocks in the flat colors. That's where I would stop in GGGB, just adding a subtle color gradient to make the drawing look warmer and more interesting. But now, Lenadai defines the volumes, adding in highlights and shadows on the figure, making them stand out a lot more. The second image is what she sends back to me. 

Then I give the image a third pass, some sort of post-production. This is a new step that I began using in the ending of GGGB: I don't know if you noticed, but the final illustrations from GGGB had an extra dimension to them: ambient light.

Using this quick and simple technique, I airbrush some colors to make the scene more interesting visually, more dramatic and and immersive. I also add extra shadows or rim-lights to the figures, and color-correct everything to make sure the colors don't look off or out of place. Usually I don't have time to polish those aspects as much as I'd like, but I think this ambient-lightning technique  provides striking results, making the illustration really come to life. I also blend in the background in a more effective way now, while in GGGB the drawings had a transparent background, overlaying the static background image. 

ORS is still centred around an art style technique that puts quantity over quality, but quality is increasing with each new chapter. I was quite happy with how good some of the drawing in Chapter 6 looked, the better they've ever looked so far. And that chapter also had by far the biggest number of illustrations in any ORS or GGGB release. The ratio of quanty-and quality is shortening, and I'm proud of that. 

I want to keep investing in all the areas of my game, like I'm doing: commissioning custom backgrounds and music, adding more people to the team to be able to make a bigger, better game. Bit by bit, with your help, we're getting there! Here are a few more WIP images, let me know if you want to see more like these and if you want me to talk about other aspects of the art creation process of the games.