One of my colleagues mentioned before Christmas that he was planning on entering a game, and would I be interested in doing a cover for the box? Sure, sounded fun. And then I forgot all about it because Santa coming has that effect on me (or perhaps it's the copious alcohol).
Obviously I did end up painting the cover (or this would be a very short post), and you can see it, and the rest of this tale after the break below (unless you clicked through already, in which case it's right there, probably on screen already, Look! There! Right there!).
Oh, good, you found it finally. So there it is. I didn't do a logo (I was asked not to at this time, though I happily would have), but other than that, that's what's on the front of the box. I'm not happy with it, but my wife has pointed out that I'm a big grump and never am, and that other people like it just fine. I shall take them at their word, but there is still room for improvement. Fortunately I may get the chance to do that as my colleague is planning on taking the concept further if it does well in the competition; with a Kickstarter and that sort of thing, at which point I'll revisit the art and maybe do some more depending on his needs. Oh, yes, the concept! This is from the official competition page:
Inspired by the classic novel of the same name, The Most Dangerous Game is a game of cat and mouse based on deduction and skill. One player takes on the role of Huntsman General Zaroff as he tracks up to four Captives he has lured to his Island to be hunted for sport.
The General has Two Days to track, hunt, and kill his prey lest they otherwise escape. The catch being that while The Hunter is visible, the Captives are not. Using coordination, ingenuity and the resources at their disposal, the Captives must do everything they can to survive The Most Dangerous Game.
While the evil huntsman is described as such, and is painted as such on the cover, the game is designed to let General Zaroff be either male or female, and one of the original intentions was to show both a male and female hunter on the cover. Alas that would have taken too long, and cost too much, so we settled on just the male Zaroff. If it goes forward I'm guessing I'll get a chance to paint a female hunter at some point.
So, anyway, back to the tale...
Tyler, my colleague, got back to me in mid January and asked if I was still interested. I was, but at the time I was a little way through working on my next book cover for Phil Sandifer, and I knew I was going to be held up with that and some other things for a couple of weeks. I let him know, but said I would do what I could to get to his cover ASAP, and I'd scribble up some composition ideas in the mean time. I had one brief - It must look 'pulp adventure' - and a rough idea of the premise of the game and the characters involved (I say rough, nut Tyler wrote me about a 20 page in depth description with example pictures and everything - it was pretty epic). The idea thumbnails are shown above.
There were some other ideas too, including the hunter in his trophy room, but I didn't sketch those out. Yes, they're very rough, and yes, they're hard to read and sort of messy. They did the job, and as you'll see the one finally picked was surprisingly close to what I ended up painting. I'm actually quite pleased with some of these, since I was doing them on a tablet, which I've never done before, and I had no reference at all while sketching; so a pith helmet, a fedora or a rifle being remotely recognisable is a major win in my opinion. Anyway, we picked the one 2nd row down in the middle, with the green snot all over it (they were supposed to be palm trees, don't judge me!).
So the first thing I did was go gather some reference, lots of it. But I couldn't find anyone in quite the poses I wanted, which meant I needed to take some photos to work from (I know, I could have just winged it, but Tyler didn't want it to look comicbook like, and that's the best I can currently do without a good reference).
I scheduled time with a model (actually a friend of my wife's) to stand in for the Archeologist (that's the woman with a machete), and since she didn't know anyone broad shouldered enough to stand in for the explorer (and I didn't want to ask anyone at work because I was frankly too embarrassed) I decided to do that myself, knowing I'd have to adjust for my less than heroic gut. I ordered a cheap Pith helmet online (which turned out to be a bit crap), and went to a local costume store to buy a cheap Fedora (which turned out to be surprisingly awesome).
I actually wanted a Panama hat, not wanting the Explorer to be too much like Indiana Jones, but ended up with a fedora anyway. Not an Indiana Jones one, a slightly more vertical one with a slightly wider brim that's actually from a 4th Doctor Doctor Who outfit.
With all that in place I was ready for the photoshoot, and then the weather was awful and the model couldn't make it. My wife stood in for her, and ended up in a jacket I never would have thought of if the model had come 'round, and which altered how I wanted the Archeologist to look. Less fortuitously it's a really dark blue crushed velvet jacket that reads almost black in the photos, but I didn't know that at the time - to the eye it's perfectly visible. Then I set up some lights and popped the camera on a timer. You don't get to see the full photograph because my wife would kill me, and I'm a bit mortified myself, but only fair you get to see something I guess.
Yes, I'm facing in completely the wrong direction, which caused some issues later on, but nothing major; I just flipped the photo for some of the next step, and then flipped it back for the rest. I had more photos, but this is the one I mostly worked from. On the left you can see my wife's arm, and how dark the jacket came out.
Next step was working up some line art. Due to wanting to wait on the model and the Pith Helmet (which didn't arrive in time for the photos in the end anyway) I'd put off doing much more than researching, and this unfortunately left me with only 10 days to paint the thing. If this was my full time job this would not be an issue, but it was a bit tight given I'd only be able to spend a couple of hours a night on it. For once I was determined to ensure I had a good starting point, and so took the first three days of my time working up the sketch to the best of my ability. First I removed the horrible greenery from the initial sketch, and then worked over that.
I reworked the poses to better match the photographic reference - sadly the result turned out less dynamic than the initial sketch, but I didn't really twig to that at the time. The blocking of the figures was done with the aid of a grid to keep the proportions straight, and as I've said, the photo got flipped so that the body of the explorer was in line with the initial composition. I didn't stick too closely to the grid though, as I needed to compensate for my stomach and wanted the rear arm in a better position (I used another photo to refer to there).
After that I just started sketching in details on top of the block-in, using the photos as reference, and the reference I'd collected for the background. I left the hunter out, intending to get to him later. I did cheat on the Explorer's hands, because I could not get them to look right - in the end I took the two photos I was using as reference and just traced over them, and then adjusted the forearms to match. Time was tight and I wanted to get painting.
When I say 'painting' I mean digitally of course. I can paint with real paint but I'm not terribly comfortable with it, or good with it, or quick with it. Digital was fine for this assignment, so I went with that. After the line art everything else was done in ArtRage.
Initially I was intending to treat it much like a speedpainting, and while bits of it were done in just the same way I do those most of it ended up not being that way because I painted the shirt and hated how it came out - you'll see I revisit it near the end. It did mean I had a pretty solid base to work from for the rest of the picture though.
You may wonder why the sky is yellow. It's because many pulp adventure illustrations had yellow skies. I'm not completely sure why, but if I had to guess I'd say it was because they could print the title on it and it would stand out really well, and more dramatically than if it were blue. This influenced the rest of the palette too, with the blues being slightly green skewed, and the few reds pushing more into brown.
Next up I moved to the Archaeologist's jacket. Since velvet had since occurred to me to be a poor choice of fabric for her, and since I could barely see the reference anyway, I decided to turn it into something in leather, while keeping the same basic cut of my wife's original. Not a lot to say about it other than it was the only thing in the painting I didn't have a half decent reference for, and so I'm quite pleased that it did in fact end up looking like a leather jacket.
I felt at this point that I should probably paint their faces and get that out of the way. The process was as simple as having my original photo as a reference for lighting and angle and then referencing several other photographs to make him a little more chiseled and heroic looking than me. Chief among these other refs were Richard Chamberlain and Stewart Granger, who'd both played Allan Quatermain in film versions of King Solomon's Mines. I didn't get to the ear, partly because it was late, and I completely forgot about it - I would finally get to it much later. What I didn't get to was tweaking his fairly bland expression. I wanted a look of quiet desperation, but managed this instead. I fully expected to have time to come back and fix that, but in the end time ran out. Maybe next time.
Not shown here is a similar process on the Archeologist (refs included Aubrey Plaza and Michelle Rodriguez as Tyler stated that she should be Latina), and the Explorer's arms. Like the ear I didn't get the rear arm finished before calling it quits for the night, and I didn't bother coming back to it until much later. I've also worked on the Archaeologist's tie and shirt some; these being vaguely modelled after Rachel Weisz' initial look in The Mummy (minus the pin stripes).
For the plants I just worked from various photographs of jungles and tropical islands. I thought this bit would be easy, but it turned out to be one of the more grueling parts of the whole painting. Getting foliage to look suitably dense is harder than I had thought, and oddly it doesn't really depend on using all that much more foliage (something I should have known from my day job given it's something I've done research on in the past), but rather it's placement and value. I ended up using a similar technique to the one I used on the hair of the Archeologist; a round brush with stylus pressure controlling size rather than opacity, and long smooth flicks of the wrist. This made things extra problematic, given that I'd hurt my wrist the day before (don't ask. Wasn't because of anything rude, but it was embarrassing and I don't want to make this gargantuan write up any longer than it's going to be already).
This image is here purely so you can check out the metal on the knife before I covered it over with rust. I was quite pleased with it, but alas I felt the blade needed to be rusty more than I wanted to show of my slick reflections. I've included the mountain too, because why not?
Another dreadful photograph to give you nightmares tonight. My pith helmet (which was totally pith) had finally arrived, and I needed reference for The Hunter. I forgot to ask my wife for aid in this before she went to bed, so I snapped a selfie of myself wearing the helmet under a near overhead light. My old corduroy jacket was standing in for a Safari Jacket, and I grabbed a broom to stand in for his rifle, though that ended up being pointless and not terribly helpful. I sketched the fellows face based on that and a few other references, and then painted it - adjusting the lighting to be more like one of the other photographs, which I felt was more representative of sunlight. I worked predominantly monochrome here, partly to aid him work with the yellow sky, but also because that was much easier than doing something more colourful, and I was running out of time.
Oh, and I added the mansion. That's my least favorite part of the painting - it's terribly bland, and a little out of scale. On the other hand, I was fairly careful with the perspective, so that should be right at least.
Then it was time for the various things I'd missed, such as finally returning to work on the shirt (adding definition, contrast, and better shadows), add his ear, and finish off his right hand (personally I think that's my favourite thing in the whole painting).
And then I was done. Signed it, and sent it off. Tyler seems happy with it, which is the main thing, and a few people familiar with the game have said it captures it pretty well, as well as the whole pulp adventure thing, so I guess it was a success, despite the actual creation not going terribly smoothly. There are definitely places it can be improved, and hopefully I'll get a chance to do just that, but for the time being this is where it's at. Tyler entered the contest on Thursday evening, so best of luck to him!
