In addition to portraits, I’ve also been working on illustrations that appear before each chapter in the game, giving a hint of what’s happening in it. Here are the illustrations for chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6:

I’d like to give kudos to the Funtactix team – and in my case especially to Amir Lotan, the product manager in charge of the game, who works closely with me despite the time difference between Israel and New York. He knows how to explain exactly what he needs, and adds references, helpful examples and even rough mockups sometimes. Moreover, he has the ability to pinpoint the problems in a sketch and to give the right direction to solve them. It’s easier for clients who are part of the industry and understand the art and gaming world, but it still shouldn’t be taken for granted, and it makes my work much easier and more pleasant.

Aviv

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The first step was coming up with a general look for characters in the game, and when that was approved I created head designs for all the characters, based on references from the movie. In the end, the characters’ look in the game is pretty different from the original design, and either way, since this is concept art, I’m still checking whether I can even show these pieces.

After capturing each character’s essence into a relatively simple head design (it has to be clear on a small avatar in the game), I started working on painted portraits, which appear when the player interacts with another character, for example when given a new quest. Here are the first four character the player meets in the first act: Katniss, Peeta, Gale and Primrose.

All the art for the game had to be approved by Funtactix (obviously) and by Lionsgate as well, but the main characters’ portraits also required approval by the actors themselves, so Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and other fine folk reviewed my art on its way to the game. Cool. Cool, cool cool.

Speaking of stardust: the Hollywood launch was decorated with big-ass prints of the poster I drew. Can’t really take full credit for this poster, because it’s actually a paintover: I got the composition all set on a huge Photoshop file, with the mockingjay in the background and Katniss in front of it, and worked on top of that to get the art style of the game, and to turn real-Katniss into game-Katniss. It’s still pretty damn cool to see it every time I play the game on Facebook.

There’s new content being added to the game all the time, so check it out!

www.playthga.com

Aviv

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Note: All the images in the post belong to Toysmart and cannot be used in any way.

Sounds like teen spirit

The first is “Voca”, a card game where the players need to make sounds that fit their cards. I drew three templates for the different sound categories, and the client created all the various cards by leaving one element in full color and the rest in black and white. I work in Photoshop, and here’s a short process:

1. First sketch to get the composition and poses:

2. After the first sketch the client clarified that they were looking for some “character”, not just straightforward animal illustrations.

3. After the sketch was approved, I moved on to ink, using my trusty Wacom and Photoshop’s most basic brush with size jitter set to Pen Pressure.

4. This would usually be the “flatting” step, where I fill in solid colors as preparation for coloring, but I forgot to save a screenshot of it, so here’s the final card:

And the two other template cards:

And finally, the box illustration:

Mazes and Dragons

In the second game, “Mazy”, the players place terrain tiles, similar to Carcassonne. I didn’t create all the final tiles here as well, but rather drew a bunch of elements that the client could mix’n'match to create all the tiles they desire: the background, divided to land and sea in various shapes; “decoration” elements that are actually part of the background; roads and bridges tiles, that create the connection between tiles during the game; and dragons, which as I understand were originally meant to be part of the gameplay, but ended up as visual and thematic elements that tie the whole thing together.

And again, a box illustration:

You can see another project I did for Toysmart in my gallery, for a game titled Elsewhere.

Aviv

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…Like “The Hunger Games Adventures”, a Facebook social game based on the movie based on the book, by Israeli game company Funtactix, who also brought the Mission Impossible game to Facebook a few months ago.

It’s been a pleasure working with them, but not being able to show anything or tell anyone in the process was fairly frustrating, especially since the work was so much fun. But now the official game poster is up on MTV.com, so I assume it’s safe to show it here as well: Hunger Games Adventures poster on MTV.

I hope I’ll be able to show more stuff soon. Regardless, I’m really excited about both the movie and the game, coming out this month!

Aviv

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For those of you who missed the single posts:

And as promised: A Surprise!

Allow several seconds for loading, and thanks to Evyatar Amitay for the code help!

Aviv

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“I have always dreamt of playing charades with you, Jeffrey. Just not like this. And not on dry land.”

The final group shot will be up in a couple of days, when I’ve found the time and energy to finish it up with a nice background. And there will also be a surprise! Surprise!

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Just one left!

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7 down, 2 to go.

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“I never told you this, but Changs are usually born with tails. You sort of dodged a bullet there.”

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I started with a simple composition: two World of Warcraft characters, surrounded by geeks trying to capture the moment.

Drawing the characters (I haven’t been to any of GarageGeeks’ past events, so I sort of winged it with the demographics. But after looking at some photos, there seem to be quite a few ladies there, which is great.)

The next step is rough lighting and shading, to get the general tones down. A pandaren also managed to sneak in, as a gesture to the upcoming expansion.

Starting to render (tediously working the rough shading towards the final look in black and white)

More rendering; blood-elves get their own step.

The final look in black and white, with a change of background to something more similar to the Garage location. Wanna hear something embarrassing? Round about this point my boyfriend suggested that I rotate the image and work on it in a right angle, then rotate it back when I’m done. I had not thought of this earlier.

A fairly advanced coloring stage. Basically I’m throwing a layer set to “Color” over the black-and-white, and start to fill in the right hues. Of course there will be tweaks after that, but that’s the basic idea.

Final illustration, smaller and moved down to allow space for text.

Questions? Thoughts? Feel free to comment.

Aviv

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