Speech Bubble

The Israeli group GarageGeeks has a series of events called “Meet the Industry Leaders”, and this week they’re bringing Mike Morhaime (!), Blizzard’s CEO and cofounder. I was easily coaxed into illustrating the invitation, and here’s the process. By the way, if you’re by any chance in Israel this coming Wednesday, you can check out the event page on Facebook.

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