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For a while now, I've been working on some custom labels for 7800 games. Since a lot of them just reuse the painted covers of their respective 2600 and 5200 versions, I wanted to make ones that stood out from the other platforms. I was heavily inspired by the old NES black box aesthetic, as I always liked how those actually resembled the games inside. I also went with the purple theme, like with the '84 version of the 7800. What do you guys think?

An amazing artist - Ralph McQuarrie - passed away yesterday at the age of 82. Even if you can't place the name, you've seen his work, if you've ever seen: Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back Return of the Jedi Star Trek IV Raiders of the Lost Ark Battlestar Galactica (the original series) And many more... Or played: Vanguard (Atari 2600), which he did the label artwork for (possibly others, but that's the one I know of). The Art of Star Wars was the first big "Art of..." book I ever owned, so even at a young age, I became familiar with his work and his name. If it weren't for his pre-production paintings that helped sell the movie to 20th Century Fox, it's safe to say Star Wars probably never would have happened. I've been heavily influenced by him as an artist since I was a kid. That's not to say I ever came close to painting the way he did, but it did encourage me to dream that I could. Rest in peace, Ralph. Thanks for the amazing visions you shared with all of us.

Well, it's the eighth anniversary of my blog, and my 500th blog entry. I've posted 162 episodes of Artie the Atari (with an updated index), 109 homebrew reviews (spread over 38 entries), about 40 movie reviews (I need to go in and fix some tags, apparently), blogged about 4 seasons of the WRC and 5 seasons of The Clone Wars. Plus I've posted a few To-Do lists, a handful of Photoshop tutorials, and the occasional rant about videogames. So I guess the rest was all filler. I'm not really sure how I've managed to fill 500 entries. One other topic that comes up semi-regularly though is work I've done on homebrews. My best estimate is that I've worked on over 42 homebew projects, creating label artwork for 23 of them, graphics for 17, and working on manuals, posters, banners and flyers for a bunch of others. But it's the labels that I've decided to focus on for this entry. Previously, I've posted some entries detailing the making of label artwork. And I've been meaning to get back to that, but just haven't really had the time. And at the moment, I still don't. What I did do, however, is put together a couple of galleries of label artwork. The one featured in this blog post are of labels that were used in finished projects (or were intended to be). To put them in some context, I've started adding some comments to each one. While it doesn't detail the process of creating the labels, it hopefully gives a little background into them: some of the thought processes and approaches to making them, plus some of my opinions on how well (or not) the work has held up over the years. But instead of just showing the artwork as flat pieces, I did 3D renderings of each label as if applied to a cart (or in one case, of a manual page). I did this for several reasons: I can get better consistency than if I took photos. Better lighting, composition, color control, etc. Once I had a template set up, each image took only about 1 minute to change the label on and re-render. So it was fast. Displaying the artwork this way shows it in context. These were meant to be seen on cartridges. In some cases, I also rendered boxes. It makes it harder for unscrupulous homebrew pirates to rip off my artwork and use it to sell their games. And yes - this has happened. As I add more comments to the gallery, I'll mention it in the comments here below. I'm about halfway through, so hopefully by the end of the week I'll be finished. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the gallery. Some of the work holds up better than others, but it's all arranged chronologically, so at the very least you can see how the work has evolved over the years. I think I've gotten better. I hope so. The other gallery I've set up is for labels I've created for contests. But that will have to wait for another blog entry. (There are no comments there yet, but you can peruse it if you like.) Update: Since I originally posted this, I've decided to move the gallery over here, and turn them into full-fledged blog entries instead. More details can be found in this entry.

So I'm working on a few labels for homebrews. Well, three homebrews and one reproduction. But the reproduction might as well be a homebrew, because there's no established precedent for its artwork, so we (Dave Dries and I) can just do whatever we want. Anyway... so I've started sketching and looking through art books for inspiration, and as happens quite often with artwork, I hate pretty-much everything I'm drawing. It happens. It's a frustration which stems from not being able to draw other peoples' styles as well as they do. Which of course is to be expected, since I'm not them. I don't have their training, talent, background or experiences. My skill set is different. The trick is, finding a happy compromise between my style, and the style I'm trying to rip off emulate. It does take some time though, because to mimic a particular style, even to a small degree, takes time to break down the style, and learn it well enough to get away with something that bears a passing (and not embarrassing) resemblance to the original. Something that says, "Ah... he was inspired by such-and-such, and made it his own," rather than "That talentless hack shouldn't have even made the attempt in the first place." Inevitably, this process results in bad drawings. Lots of them. It's part of the process. Trial and error. The problem is when the bad drawings become more of a source of frustration than merely a part of that process. Then drawing tends to lose its fun, and I have to step away from it. Sometimes I step away from it for a few hours. Maybe a few days. Or weeks. Or months. Once I stepped away from it for years. But that's another story. This story is about the present, and more to the point - about bad drawings. Oddly enough, some of my favorite drawings that I've done are "bad drawings". They tend to be quick sketches, usually cartoons, where something stupid happens, because at the moment I drew it, something struck me as being funny. They capture a moment better than drawings that I labor over for months. Some still make me laugh. So when I found myself getting frustrated yesterday, I decided I needed to loosen up, and just draw something stupid. Just to remind myself, drawing is supposed to be fun, and even if I can't at the moment draw what I want to, I can still draw. Even if it's a bad drawing... just draw. I have entire sketchbooks filled with bad drawings. Admittedly, most of them weren't intentionally bad. I also have a bunch of half-empty sketchbooks sitting around, waiting to be filled with more bad drawings. But I've had a really hard time committing ideas to paper for some reason lately. Not sure why... something about the permanency of it. I'm very bad about throwing away bad drawings, or any drawings for that matter. And I don't particularly like revisiting really bad ones. So I guess the problem is - I'm hesitant to produce work that's going to sit there in a stack in the corner of my room, mocking me. So I decided to try something different. Something completely non-permanent. I needed to break down the process of drawing right back to it's most fundamental experience. Even using a graphics tablet on my Mac didn't work to break me out of my funk, because the results weren't any better than what I had been doing on paper, and I still wasn't able to loosen up enough to just, well... scribble. All of that coincided with something else that happened yesterday - I went to a Mac store. I had to pick up an iMac we had repaired for work. While I was there, I noticed they had styluses for iPhones and iPads. I bought Autodesk's SketchBook Mobile for my iPhone awhile ago, but had never really done anything with it, since trying to draw precisely with my finger was pretty futile. So I tried the styluses out. One was small and lightweight, one was milled out of aluminum and very chunky, and neither were really any better than drawing with my finger. The problem is, for a capacity stylus to work, the end of it has to be about as large as a pencil eraser or Q-tip. And that's exactly what using the styluses were like - very imprecise, kind of squishy, and I also had to press pretty hard for them to work. So a stylus just wasn't going to work. So when I got home that night, I decided I might as well try drawing with my finger on my iPhone. Nothing permanent about that. And certainly nothing that I could afford to get fussy over, due to the completely imprecise nature of it. And so... I just scribbled. I made one or two attempts to get started, erasing everything, until I just started scribbling the stupidest-looking human I could. (Drawing humans has always been particularly vexing for me, and three of the labels I'm working on feature humans. Smart move there. ) Maybe I felt like an idiot, or felt that all I could draw was an idiot... so I drew an idiot. And a funny thing happened... I started enjoying it. I started using the tools in Sketchbook Mobile to zoom in, put in cross-hatching and detail, added layers with color and shading, and actually had fun drawing this stupid-looking guy. Another bad drawing, but in a good way. Tonight, still at loggerheads with drawing what I wanted to be drawing, I returned to my iPhone, and decided to see if I could draw something Syd Mead-esque, since I'd picked up his Sentury II book for inspiration for the labels I'm working on. I figured chrome and metal was a good place to start since those are fairly easy to do, and look good if you can pull them off. So I drew a little semi-futuristic car. It actually turned out pretty good, for not having my usual slate of drawing tools available (and I've been drawing cars longer than anything, so it was challenging to not have a larger canvas). Speaking of larger canvases, these have been reduced to the resolution of my iPhone's screen (480 x 320), but the software itself actually makes the documents at 1024 x 682, so there's enough resolution to zoom in and add some reasonable detail. By this time, I'd figured on posting these to my blog, so I decided I'd better do something videogame-related. And thus... Pac-Man. So now, I'm finally starting to loosen up again. The next step will be taking this back to the world of paper, and moving on from there. But I think I'm going to keep my iPhone handy... just in case.

Awhile ago, I went over the process for coming up with the Harmony cart logo, and the pre-production label. I assumed at the time that there wouldn't be much of a change from that label to the final. Hoo... boy! Fred (batari) was interested in having a new label for the final cart (now available for purchase), although he wanted to keep the same sort of color scheme (green and white) as the previous one. The green and white, incidentally, comes from the color of the circuit board and the silkscreened logo on it. He also wanted to incorporate a yin yang symbol into it, since that's what the Harmony cart uses for a "wait" icon on screen. Plus, it ties into the whole Harmony theme nicely as well. He'd dug around on the internet, and found this: Initially, he'd suggested wrapping the circuit board and maybe some code onto the surface, mimicking this graphic fairly closely. But I didn't really want to just re-do something someone else had done. But I liked the idea of a glass sphere for a yin yang, and somehow incorporating the circuit board into it, since that was used on the pre-production label. What I ended up doing, was placing the circuit board inside of a glass yin yang, in 3D. By changing the index of refraction of the glass, I could distort the image of the circuit board to effectively wrap it onto the inside surface. First, I had to build the circuit board. This was streamlined a great deal by the fact that I could open up the same file used to make the real circuit board in Illustrator, and exporting that into my 3D program (Carrara). Of course, it wasn't quite that simple, since I first had to break everything into usable pieces - the board, traces, holes, silkscreen, etc., then reassemble them in Carrara as a model: I made the board translucent, so the traces on the back side would be partially visible, and so the light would shine through it. Next, I had to build the glass yin yang. This was actually pretty easy - it's just a glass sphere cut in half with a spline, and a couple of holes punched through it. Using boolean operations, I was able to end up with all of the parts I needed. (I tried just using a simple glass sphere, and colorizing the yin yang pattern in Photoshop, but that lacked all of the interesting internal reflections and distortions that the extra geometry caused.) I ended up making two rendering passes with different lights turned on. I wanted the color intensity of the brighter one, but needed to blend away some of the over-exposed areas by combining it with the darker one. For the logo, initially I was going to use the silkscreened logo on the board itself, but that would have been too small. So I removed that, and placed a much larger logo in the sphere. The problem was that the geometry of the yin yang caused unwanted distortions in the logo. So I had to cheat. I rendered out just the Harmony logo within solid green and white glass spheres, and used alpha channels to mask them: This ensured that the overall refraction, color and lighting would match the yin yang/circuit board rendering. Then I combined them together in Photoshop: Then, the whole thing was composited in Photoshop - the different yin yang renders, and the logos - into the final image: Each rendering pass for the yin yang took about two hours. (The logos were much quicker.) That doesn't count all of the test renders done to get the lighting, color, refraction, lens distortion and camera position dialed in. I'd guess that on a newer eight-core Mac, that would be closer to 15 minutes per render. This is the final label, as seen on the production version of the Harmony cart: I completely neglected to put my name anywhere in there. In hindsight, I should have hidden it in the text printed on one of the chips, or silkscreened my initials onto the circuit board. I also ended up doing an AtariAge logo yin yang for the back cover of the manual: This gives you a better look at just the sphere, without the circuit board in it. It uses all of the same tricks - multiple render passes, doing the logo separately, and compositing everything in Photoshop. But since I'd already finished the Harmony image by then, this one went much more quickly. Also in the manual, I had to create a few illustrations showing how to use the Harmony cart. I could have tried drawing them in Illustrator freehand, but there's a better way - I just set up what I wanted to have in each illustration, and took a photo of it with my iPhone: Then I simply drew over it in Illustrator, cleaning it up and straightening out lines as needed: It ended up as a nice, clean illustration that clearly gets the point across. Sometimes simpler is better. (The SD logo is trademarked, so Fred asked me to come up with a non-infringing look-alike.) The latest thing I've done for the Harmony project was create a Melody logo: I used the same process as for the Harmony logo. Technically, the Harmony board shown above is a Melody board. The same main circuit board is used for both the Melody and Harmony - but the Melody is a single-cart version for use in homebrews, while the Harmony adds multicart functionality. I just never got around to modeling the additional circuit board that contains the Harmony's SD card slot and USB port. It's just as well though - this has a more symmetrical look than a full Harmony board does. The Melody logo won't actually be used on Melody boards - it's too expensive to do separate runs just for the sake of a logo, so everything has the Harmony logo on it. The Melody logo is basically just there for use in the AtariAge store.

Here's why I like label contests... They allow me to just do whatever I want, and not worry about someone else liking it or not. Now that's not to say I don't want the programmer to like it, or that I don't get to do what I want with labels-for-hire. Quite the contrary. Of course I'd like to win the contest, and as for the other, I'm generally given pretty-much free reign when asked to design labels. Mostly... But contests just let me play around without any pressure. I can try out new things, just for the sake of having fun with art. This goes back to childhood, where drawing was part of playing. I drew because it was fun to do. I still scribble the occasional cartoon during meetings or whenever, just for fun (I need to do that more... we have a lot more meetings now). I find that I have more fun with contests if I focus more on creating artwork I like, rather than trying to make something that might be "a winner". And anyway, trying to make "a winner" really doesn't work, since you never know what a particular programmer is going to like. I hadn't planned on entering the Failsafe label contest, because I'd been working on a couple of other labels recently (K.O. Cruiser and Duck Attack! - coming soon-ish to an AtariAge store near you), so I really didn't want to put a lot of time into another illustration, plus I had a hard time figuring out what to do for a label for the game. If an idea doesn't strike me pretty quickly when playing a game, then I've found there's no point in trying to force one to happen. Also, since I'd done some tank labels for the Incoming! contest, I didn't just want to repeat myself... But late last week, after playing the game some more (if you haven't played it, it's a bit like Strategy X), the thing that caught my attention most was the need to figure out a code to stop an enemy missile launch. You do this by finding pieces of the code along the way. So I was wondering, "Where would you find pieces of a launch code?" Then I thought, "the 'football!'" This is the code term used to describe the briefcase the President of the U.S. carries around, to enable him to launch nuclear weapons. Let's see him get that through airport security! Anyway, so I sketched out a quick idea that told a story. These bad guys are carrying around these cases that can launch the missile. So you (in your tank) have to track them down, and get the cases away from them, to get the codes. Now this part doesn't actually happen in the game, but hey - labels are subject to interpretation. Read the Super Breakout manual sometime if you don't believe me. I made it look like "something bad" happened to the courier, and that resulted in the case being damaged, and only showing part of the code. If you were able to get the whole code from one case, it'd be a pretty short game! I made some other sketches after this, trying to get the details of the case right, but nothing else worked as well as this one. I also wanted a different look to this, so I opened the sketch in Painter, and just painted pretty roughly over the top of it. It's probably not a very accurate tank (since I didn't look up any reference for it), but that wasn't the point. The point was conveying a mood, telling a story, and playing around with digital paint for a "look". I was fairly pleased with the end results: Once I finished with it, I felt it lost too much of the feel of the original sketch, so I overlaid part of the sketch back over it. That helped to add back some of the rough quality I was looking for. The text at the top is a bit hard to read, but that's intentional. Yes... it may be considered bad design, but I don't think all of that little text ("Atari", "Video Game Cartridge") is all that important. The main things you need to read are the "7800" and the name of the game. I wanted the rest to blend in with the artwork's color palette. I originally had re-created the game's title-screen font, including the stencil cuts. But in the end, they just made the title too hard to read, so I just made the logo without them (based on a modified Eurostile Bold Extended). The second entry I did definitely fits in the "just having fun" category. I was trying to figure out how to make a cartoony label for the game, but not all games lend themselves to a cartoony label. Then I remembered part of the instructions on the contest page that read: "To be consistent with Bob DeCrescenzo's previous game releases...". So, since three of Bob's previous games were Pac-Man titles, I thought, "Of course! Pac-Man in a tank!" And I quickly sketched that up. It needed something else though, and I was thinking of having a monster running away from him. But then I thought better of it, and drew one of them caught under the tank treads instead: (I drew the monster offset, since I didn't want to erase any of the tank I'd drawn, and I could put everything together later anyway.) I took the sketch into Illustrator, and re-drew it there, cleaning up the lines, drawing the letterforms and adding color. Then I did some shading and the background in Photoshop: I particularly like the monster trying to claw his way out from underneath the tank tread, and the fact that inevitably, he's going to get caught up in it and make a satisfying "flump, flump, flump" sound as his face repeatedly smacks into the ground. It's the simple things... Of course this wasn't done with any intention of it being a serious entry, but I figured I'd submit it anyway, just for fun. If Bob or someone else gets a laugh out of it, then it was worth the effort. For that matter, since I had fun with it, it was worth the effort. But just for the sake of arguement... who's to say Pac-Man isn't driving the tank in the game? He could be. And he'd sell a lot of copies of the game, too.

Recently, I've been doing some work for the forthcoming Harmony cart. In case you've missed it, the Harmony is a programmable cartridge for the 2600, which you can use as a multi-cart for playing nearly every 2600 game ever made, or for developing homebrews and testing them on real hardware. The genesis of the project was in trying to come up with a way to produce homebrew cartridges in a more efficient manner, rather than Albert having to hand-solder and assemble every single circuit board, one at a time. The end result uses an ARM processor to handle all of the various bankswitching modes, extra RAM schemes, the DPC (Pitfall II) chip, and even SuperCharger circuitry that 2600 games have used over the years. This is possible because all of that extra stuff was handled externally from the 2600, so by finding a processor that could be programmed to reproduce those functions and load the necessary game ROMs, the 2600 just sees exactly what it would if the original games were plugged into it. Now the original Harmony project is actually being referred to as Melody, rather than Harmony, because the Harmony cart has developed into a programmable multi-cart, which features a USB port (for firmware updates) and an SD card slot for loading games. I've been beta-testing it, and it works slick! I've had a Krokodile Cart for a few years now, and the Harmony is basically a more modern version of it. The cost of components has come down, their functionality has gone up, and so the Harmony is not only cheaper, but is easier to use (the SD card is sweet, and no power supply is required), and has broader compatibility. (Incidentally, the name Harmony comes from the ARM processor, and the multi-cart aspect of it; whereas Melody is meant as a single-game, mass-produced, low cost means for producing homebrew cartridges.) Anyway, after months of development, the Harmony was sold as a pre-production version the other week at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. But first, it needed a logo. That's where I came in. First, I was asked to come up with a small logo for the on-screen menu. Initially, it just said "Harmony" in plain text: I didn't have much space to work with, but kicked around about a half-dozen ideas, including: And: Which became the one that we ended up going with. My idea behind the design was to mimic the flow of notes moving up and down a musical staff, and then incorporate a musical note into the "H" (hardly a new idea, by the way ). And while the Harmony cart isn't exclusively geared to music, it really doesn't make much sense to ignore the name's musical connotations. (Incidentally, there is no musical staff onscreen because we tried it, and it just became too cluttered.) Then, we needed a label. Fred (batari) had taken a really nice photo of the Harmony board, so that became the background: The trick then, was how to translate the onscreen logo to something suitable for the cartridge? Usually I work the other way - starting with a high-resolution logo, then reducing it to work on the 2600. First, I just tried tracing the onscreen logo and smoothing it out in Illustrator... Uh... no. Too sloppy. So then I decided to try modifying a font, to see if I could mimic the onscreen "font" I'd drawn... Ick. It took too much hacking to get the letterforms where I thought they needed to be. Clearly, a different approach was in order. So I decided to just design the logo the way I normally would - make it look good at full resolution first, and worry about the onscreen version later. I started out with a different font that I felt would lend itself to the look I wanted without having to do extensive hacking to it. In this case, Bernard MT Condensed: I also grabbed a note from the Opus font: Then, I incorporated that into the "H", and chopped off most of the serifs from the font: After that, I offset the letters as if they were moving up and down a musical staff, and modified the "y" to wrap around the "n": And finally, I used Illustrator's "warp" function to make the letters flow together, and at Thomas' suggestion, added a slur under "arm" to emphasize the name's origin: Several passes and revisions at the pre-production label followed, until we arrived at: Which is, in all likelihood, going to be very similar to the final production version. There currently isn't an end label, since the end of the cart is mostly taken up with the SD card slot and USB port. But you never know... After all this, I had to go back and redesign the onscreen logo to better match the cart label. A few more revisions followed, and in the end, it had to be about half-height, since there just wasn't room in the menu for a proportionally correct logo. But it's essentially the same logo, and I'm satisfied with it (and kudos to Thomas for coming up with the extra bytes necessary to even fit it on there): And an actual screenshot of the menu, from Stella, with color: So keep your eyes peeled for the Harmony cart. I still have a manual to design (once the text gets finalized), and there's some more testing to do. But it seems to be entering the final stretch now, and I think it's going to be a big hit. Even more though, I'm excited about the possibilities the Melody cart may open up for homebrewing with extra RAM, ROM, and other goodies.

I'd only planned on doing two contest entries (and therefore two blog entries) for Incoming!, but things happen. So with that, I present parts 3 and 4 of the 2 part series on the making of my Incoming! label contest entries. Part 3 After the first round of entries were posted for the contest I was thinking, "what else could I do that would be different?" I came up with some vague idea about using the gun sights of a tank, but didn't have a clear design for it. So I started Googling for tank gun sights. Nothing that came up interested me, and I was trying to think of someplace I could find a suitable high-tech, yet simple gun sight image. Then I remembered the Bradley Trainer. Never heard of it? Well, it's the official name of the long-rumored military version of Battlezone Atari created. You can watch a vintage news clip about it here. Cool, huh? Anyway, the Bradley Trainer has a spiffy targeting sight in it, with crosshairs and numbers and stuff. So I thought it would be perfect: I then decided it would become the basis for my entire label design for two reasons: Battlezone is my all-time favorite arcade game and it would be a way of paying tribute to it I've always wanted to make a label that looked like a vector game because vector games are cool So I started working from screenshots, re-creating the vectors as line art in FreeHand: By reshaping and stretching lines and moving things around, I made the terrain more Incoming-like: This had the vector look I was after, but it was missing a key element. It needed the enemy's incoming round to complete the picture. I added that, and then colored the vectors to look more like Battlezone: I took a few liberties by adding extra colors, to help distinguish the gun sight and HUD from the background. At this point, I felt it was good to go. But then I played around with Photoshop's "Black and White" adjustment controls, which remove color from an image, and can re-tint it. What I ended up with was a cyan vector image. It "glowed" better than the other one, and also reminded me of the early monochromatic vector games with light blue overlays like Tailgunner and Red Baron. I really loved the look of those games, so I decided to go ahead and submit it as an entry: After that, I also readjusted the "Battlezone" version, so its glow matched the cyan one better, and submitted it as well: Can you spot what's wrong with the tactical display? Now, I didn't do this label with any intent of trying to win the contest with it. This was just done for fun, for me. It's such an esoteric concept that Ben would have to be a major Battlezone (or vector game) fan to even consider using it. But that's okay - I had fun making it. (In hindsight, I would probably change some of the letters on the HUD to include AA and my initials.) After I finished that, I figured I was done with the Incoming! contest for sure. Until this afternoon. Part 4 I was sitting around watching the Southern California wildfires on TV (which got within about 3 or 4 miles of where I live), and wanted a break from it all. Looking back at the contest page, I really liked the whimsey of SEgamer's first entry. So I was trying to think of something whimsical and fun. Silly and cartoony. No war machines. No fire. No explosions. Just kids playing "army tanks" in the sand. I thought of having them in toy tanks (like pedal cars), but then I thought - real kids would just make their own tanks out of cardboard boxes. And so I started sketching. As I was drawing, it evolved from them being on wide-open sand (the beach) to a sandbox at a playground. The idea of them being in such a confined space just made the whole thing more... comforting. They were obviously some place safe and familiar. No misunderstanding about them being stuck out in the middle of a real desert somewhere. Plus, I really liked their ridiculously close proximity - it just felt like the way kids would play. And of course the weapon-of-choice had to be a water balloon: I wanted to keep as much of the feel of the sketch as I could, so once again I turned to Painter, and just painted the entire label there. Really rough, really fast. The end result is something I'm completely delighted with: Does it have anything to do with the game? Hardly. But again, I'm not entering this one with the intent of trying to win. I did this for fun. I needed fun today. I think during the Lead contest, I got so wrapped up with making a clean, polished label - a "winner" - that I lost some of the fun that needs to be inherent in creating art in the first place. Now, I'm having fun again.

I'm splitting this "making of" into two parts. The first part will go over the usual "how I made the label" thing (is this getting boring yet?), and part two will be more of a Photoshop tutorial. After the Lead contest, I really wanted to do something that felt more like a painting, or a loose illustration. Not really tight and fussed over as my Lead illustrations had been. A lot of the early Atari 2600 artwork has a loose feel to it, where you can still see some of the pencil art underneath. I've always liked that look. It's like I'm getting a peek at something behind-the-scenes, and stepping back through time to get a little closer to the thought processes of the artist who created the work. For Incoming!, I started looking at pictures of tanks, and read the intro paragraph Ben Larson had written for the contest. I decided to focus on the idea of a tank dropping in from out of the sky. Even though that didn't constitute the main part of the game play, it was the coolest part of the backstory. So I started sketching, and pretty quickly, this jumped off the end of the pencil: Every once in awhile that just happens - where the first sketch is the one you want to work with. It didn't take much fussing around. It had the action, dynamic, and even the basic composition I was after. The trick then was to take that (which was a pretty small sketch), and turn it into something presentable. After a few failed attempts at redrawing it, I simply blew up the sketch on my copier to a size I could work at, and drew over the top of it on another sheet of paper: Unlike a lot of my previous work - there's no graphite pencil lines here. I liked the rough drawing enough to just use it. I felt if I started fussing around with it too much, it would lose what I liked about it. Instead, I just isolated the tank in Photoshop, cleaned up the lines a little bit, and used that to start painting: I took the tank and background layers into Painter, and started painting. At first, I just laid down a huge swath of sand-colored paint. Then, I started adding shadows and highlights to the tank to give it some dimension, but it was still mostly just the color of the sand behind it. Some camouflage completed the tank, and pulled it away from the background. After that, I took it back into Photoshop and painted the sky, mountains, dust, and the "swoosh" effect to make it look like it was being dropped into the scene, and bouncing off of the sand dune: At this point, the artwork was about where I wanted it, based on my original sketch. But it didn't look finished. I thought about adding some soldiers to the tank, but wasn't quite sure how to make that work. Plus, I was struggling trying to come up with a logo for it. At first, I planned on just using a military-like stencil: With various other attempts at making it look like spray paint, or rust. Then, I tried variations on a computer read-out: But nothing even remotely worked the way I wanted. Then Dave Dries suggested a big cartoon balloon for the logo (like Q*bert), and everything clicked. The tank was already on the cartoony side, so I could add a couple of cartoon soldiers to the tank yelling, "Incoming!" and I'd have the illustration I was after. First, I sketched a couple of soldiers, and added them to the painting: I printed out the artwork, and used that as a guide to draw the logo: Then I scanned it, and cleaned it up in FreeHand. Since this was the logo, I didn't want it to be sketchy. Plus, as vector art, I could freely resize it as needed: Finally, I added the logo and text, and cropped the label to the correct dimensions: At this point, I was pretty happy with the whole thing. But I decided that it could use something else... ...explosions!! Next time: we blow stuff up... real good!

Well, since I've had a number of people* tell me that they really liked my 15th entry in the Lead contest, I thought I'd post a blog entry about it. *That number would be "three". This was by far the easier of the two illustrations. No 3D here. Just drawing. As always, it started out with some rough sketches. The idea I wanted to convey was a sense of speed, as the player's ship hurtled past the energy walls, and fired away at oncoming ships. So I wanted lots of streaks and blurring to get across that speed: As messy as it was, the sketch had the dynamic I was looking for. Of course, translating that into the final art is the trick. The sense of urgency often found in sketches almost never makes it through to the end of the process. The drawing went pretty fast. The player's ship was based on the Seeker from Space Academy (bonus points if you can remember the annoying robot's name without looking it up), but I made it sleeker and more fighter-like (I used to draw ships like this all the time when I was a kid). The enemy ships were a cross between the Death Gliders in Stargate SG-1 and the original Cylon Raiders from Battlestar Galactica, although Dave Dries pointed out that they looked more like croissants. I prefer to think of them as evil, flying, space croissants: As I often do, I drew the other elements on a separate sheet of paper, so I could change them more easily as needed. The little "+" signs are registration marks, so after I scan everything in, I can align them later: Then, there was the usual round of re-drawing the art as vectors in FreeHand: And painting it in Photoshop: The painting went pretty fast, but it just looked too empty. In order to gain that sense of speed the sketch had, I really needed to add star streaks to it. I couldn't think of an easy way to do it, until I figured out something I could do using After Effects. After Effects is an Adobe program used in special effects work and video compositing. We use it all the time at work for animation. To get the star streaks, first I generated a star field in Photoshop using Alien Skin's Xenofex2. Alien Skin makes some great Photoshop plug-ins, and I own several of their products. I needed to make it appear as if I was zooming into a corner of the star field. After Effects is all about manipulating virtual "cameras" over time, so I set up a couple of keyframes to do just that. This is the full star field, and the box shows the area I would zoom into: This is the zoomed-in view: Next, I applied an effect, which caused frames in between the two keyframes to blur together, sort of like keeping the shutter on a camera open: This is basically the way the original hyperspace effect was achieved for Star Wars, using computer-controlled cameras and film exposures. By changing different parameters, I could make the streaks longer or shorter. It took some experimenting to get the desired effect. After that, it was a matter of dropping the final star streaks back into the Photoshop file, and painting out some of them so they didn't interfere with the rest of the artwork. I also added a "nebula" of sorts, to give some more depth to it, and to make it seem as if the enemy ships were emerging from the center of it: Finally, I used the illustration in several different layouts, including dropping it into a couple of Atari label templates that I made (I don't use the online one, in case you were wondering). For most of the contests I've entered, I've made Atari-style variations "just in case" that was the preference of the programmer. But I don't favor them. Actually I find that whole thing a bit perplexing. I would think after all of the work a programmer went to to make their own game, why would they want to "give credit" to a company that had absolutely nothing to do with it? Why make their game look like "just another" Atari cartridge? Anyway, my entries for the Incoming! contest won't have any Atari-style labels among them. I decided to take a different approach with that one. But that will have to wait for another blog entry. One that will feature... explosions!

It's been awhile since I posted a "making of" for label artwork. Mainly because there hasn't been anything released in quite awhile, so there hasn't been anything to share. (There are a couple of labels I've been working on, but until those games are released, the art will have to stay under wraps.) However, since the Lead contest just wrapped up, I can show some of the steps in making one of the illustrations I did for that. Originally, my concept was to have a group of alien pilots standing in a spaceship hangar, all looking at you (the gamer), basically challenging you to lead them. The sketch, which I threw together in Painter, was really rough, and showed the pilots reflected in your helmet's visor: I wanted the aliens to all have a different appearance - color, shape, etc., so it was obvious they were from different planets (hence all the different ships in the game), but I still wanted there to be some common element tying them all in together. At the time, I figured it would be helmets with big, dark faceplates. But even though that element remained, I'd come up with something else, later. To start drawing them I wanted some reference. I knew I'd have a short, cartoony guy in there (which is familiar territory), but the rest I wanted to have more realistic (for aliens??) proportions. So I turned to Poser. Now, Poser is both a good tool, and just a really creepy program. It allows you to pose and render über-realistic humans. It also comes with a few other models (like the cartoony guy shown below), and you can download additional models (like the anime girl shown below, which I initially got for reference for the RPS label). If used right, it can be a handy starting point for artwork that doesn't look like you used a 3D program. But most of the time, people seem to just use it to render rather dubious, photo-realistic pictures of women. (This falls under the whole "move out of your parents' basement already" category.) But I digress. This is what I used for my reference: Kind of ugly, isn't it? The tall guy is stretched really weird, the lighting is bad, and it really doesn't look like much. But what it gets me, is proportion and perspective. Placement of feet, foreshortening, relative heights, etc. It allowed me to figure out what poses I wanted, proportions of the characters, placement of the camera, and adjust it quickly and accurately. Instead of attempting to model costumes, helmets and props, then try and render it all as 3D objects, I just printed the above render out, slapped a piece of paper over it, and started drawing. This allowed me to tweak proportions, and freely add or change whatever I wanted. I could also make the tall and short guys look a lot more alien. Best of all - it completely lost its roots in a 3D program, and looks like it was just drawn: After this, I realized that my original concept of them being reflected in the helmet just wasn't going to work. The detail would get all lost, and I ran a big risk of people not "getting it". And logically, it doesn't make any sense, since if you're the pilot, how are you looking into the reflection on the outside of your own helmet? Also at this point, I decided to stick with just the four pilots. I made several attempts to try and stick a floating robot in there, but everything just ended up looking like I swiped it out of Wall-E, so I gave that up. Next, I needed to do something to establish that this was all taking place in a spaceship hangar. Dave Dries suggested having a ship in the hangar practically right on top of them. That sounded like a good idea, so I started building a ship in 3D: This was hacked together in Carrara, another 3D program. Even though it's "possible" to move models between Poser and Carrara, I really didn't need the models in the same program. I just needed to position the ship in such a way that it looked like the pilots were standing in front of it when everything was put together. So I printed out a copy of the pilot line art, and taped it to my monitor. This allowed me to see through it enough to position the ship behind it, and line things up. Sort of like this: When I got the ship positioned, I did a quick render of it, and printed that out. Then I threw a sheet of paper on top of that, and re-drew the ship: Another drawing on top of that resulted in the hangar (based on the grid lines in the 3D render): When composited together, the rough sketches looked like this: After that, I went in and cleaned up all the lines in FreeHand, as I'd done elsewhere: Everything is separated onto individual layers, to make it easier to paint. I still use the basic techniques shown in my Photoshop tutorials from a few years ago, although I should update those, since I've learned some new tricks since then. While painting them, I figured out that other element needed to tie them together: their costumes would all be made of the same shiny black material, with color accents. The black ended up looking kind of rubbery, which was fine, and allowed me to make it look like the tall guy's spacesuit could expand or contract, as if he had some really weird alien physiology under all that hardware. Plus it looked really good on the female pilot. The overall color of the hangar was a leftover from the 3D ship render. That just happened to be the default background color in Carrara, and I liked it enough to keep it. This is the final art, prior to being cropped: Note that the edges are unfinished. Even so, I ended up making this much wider than it really needed to be, since the emphasis was always supposed to be on the pilots. But I tend to get carried away with this stuff. (And I justified it to myself by reasoning that if it had won the contest, I could re-use the larger art for the manual. Oh well... ) I further modified this by adding some additional layers to make a "backlit" version, as seen in some of the contest entries I submitted. But it's still basically the same illustration.

Well, I've been so busy this month, I had almost forgotten that October marks the third anniversary of my blog. Unlike my 200th Blog Entry Spectacular, I'm not planning anything special for the occasion. Mainly because I already missed it. But it does give me an excuse for my annual reminder that once again - Baskin Robbins has pumpkin pie ice cream! I've already picked up my first quart. (Don't forget to try it with a scoop of their chocolate. Good stuff.) Anyway, I need to get back to working on my label entries for the Lead contest. Since Albert extended the contest, I've been able to spend a bit more time on them. Edit: Finished up the labels late last night (well technically, early this morning). I basically did two illustrations, with an additional variation on one of them, then several different layouts. These are some of the more involved (and time-consuming) label illustrations I've done so far. It's a risk putting so much time into something that has no guarantee of ever being used, but I did find a few new cool Photoshop tricks along the way, so it won't be a total loss. They should be up on the contest page tonight or tomorrow sometime. Here are a couple of sneak-peeks:

When coming up with a label for Bob's port of Squish 'Em, I ran into the artist's equivalent of writer's block. Y'see, I thought it would be funny to send Bob this for a label design: Just as a joke, of course. Unfortunately - that idea stuck in my head, and I couldn't get it out! But what I wanted, was something that implied some of the ideas in the classic Popeye cartoon A Dream Walking. So, as is often the case, I pestered Dave Dries for some ideas. We'd been planning to collaborate on another project, and this seemed like a good candidate. He sent back a bunch of really cool photos, including this one: And that seemed immediately like what we should go after. Trying to capture the look of those old iron worker photos. We also decided to stick with a very limited color palette. Not quite black and white, but hinting at it. He also sent along a rough sketch of a wrap-around cover for the manual, which became the basis for the rest of the work we did. This really helped immeasurably, since it broke me away from the layout idea I had gotten stuck with. Dave created the background buildings using a plug-in for Cinema 4-D... at first. From there, I began developing the characters, while Dave worked on the cityscape: At some point, the plug-in just became too limiting, so Dave started building the city - from the ground up. This took a lot of work, but allowed him absolute control of what went into the city: There is a ton of detail in there. Especially when you consider how small the final label will be. Fortunately, the manual cover gets printed at a good size. We went through quite a few sets of foreground girders, before Dave came up with these. We wanted something that felt unsafe, hence the bent beams and skewed angles. I also wanted to make sure the guy was hanging out there only by his hand - without touching anything else - to further add to that sense of danger: After the layout was set, I finished painting the characters in Photoshop, and touched up the foreground girders to match. Also, the background was lightened and blurred a bit to give the scene some atmosphere. This is the final wrap-around cover (without text): Can you spot the AA logo? We re-used the main background, with other characters, for the interior spread (again shown without text): The background was further lightened and blurred so it wouldn't interfere with the text. And finally, once the illustrations for the manual cover were complete, I adjusted the layout to fit on the cart label: The key to being able to do that, is to keep everything on separate layers in Photoshop. Then it's easy to move things around as needed. In an earlier entry, I mentioned the importance of listening to music while I work. For this game, nothing seemed to fit quite so well as Raymond Scott. In the end, it was a lot of fun creating the artwork for Squish 'Em, and I think it's mine and Dave's best collaboration so far. It's a far better piece than anything I could have come up with on my own, and the infighting and backbiting was kept pretty-much to a minimum. Oh yeah - and the game is really, really good, too! Go buy it!

Here's a sneak-peek at a couple of projects I'm working on. They're "mostly done". First, a label for a new homebrew release. The name has been left off of this picture, although some of you may find the imagery a familiar refrain. This is a bit of a departure for me. No cartoons. No space ships. Just pure graphic design, meant to convey abstract shapes and rhythm. There's also an intentional division of the label into fourths; and a suggestion of the four directions of the joystick, and the fire button (represented by the AtariAge logo). The manual was quite a challenge to design and co-write as well, since some of the gameplay defies easy description. And secondly, this is a small part of 1/7 of another project I'm working on. But it's not for a game, and you won't have to pay for it. But it will cost you money to get one. Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, since Fred just posted an announcement about selling off his remaining NWCGE copies of Gingerbread Man, and included a nice picture of the label artwork, I figured this would be a good time to post "the making of" blog entry for it. First though, I want to recommend that you pick up this game. Directly from Fred, if possible. First of all, it's a really fun game (full review coming later). But also, Fred did a really great job of printing the manuals and labels. They're the best I've seen on a homebrew. (Okay... I'm a little biased about the artwork. But I'm referring to how it's printed here. Seriously. ) The concept for the label came from Dave Dries (who did the art for Wolfenstein VCS and Phantom II, and the backgrounds for Space Battle and the upcoming Squish 'Em). I was originally going to do something more along the lines of a scene from the game: Dave suggested having the central character surrounded by some of the bad guys from the game instead, making it more of a poster. So I sketched it up. I won't post Dave's original sketch here unless he wants me to , but here's mine: Edit: Dave's sketch is now posted in the comments. Fred liked this idea, so it would go on to become the cover artwork. Considering how rough the original sketch was, I think it took a lot of trust on Fred's part to make that decision. It's an extremely rough sketch, but apparently it still got the idea through. I kind of threw the "One Tough Cookie" tag line in as an afterthought, but Fred really liked it, so it stayed. And in case you're wondering where the logo came from... Once the cover was settled on, I ended up putting the in-game scenes inside the manual. Escaping from the kitchen: In the final, I ended up turning the chair around, because it felt too much like it was going to tip over with the cat pushing on it that way. I changed some of the proportions too, which is really easy to do once it has been turned into vector art. Battling a fire creature: I was really taken with the idea that the Gingerbread Man might be picking up pieces of his dead compatriots, and using them as weapons. And of course, waking up inside of an oven: The hardest part in all of this? Making the frosting on his hands and feet look good. That turned out to be a lot more difficult than I'd expected - but it had to look right. You had to instantly recognize it as frosting, or it couldn't be there at all. It's just one of those unexpected challenges that rears its ugly head from time to time, as you suddenly realize, "I've never drawn frosting before in my entire life."

Well, it's almost the end of October. And it's taken all month, but finally, it's here. Baskin-Robbins Pumpkin Pie ice cream. My annual addiction, as I've mentioned a couple of times before in this blog. So I've stocked up. I've got a quart of it in the freezer. Which should last me about one, maybe two... scoops. Well, they're open again tomorrow. Speaking of food... I haven't really posted anything from the finished Gingerbread Man manual. I'm kind of holding off on posting the cover artwork in its entirety, until its official release rolls around. But I don't see why I couldn't post some of the other art from the manual. I ended up doing four illustrations for the manual, in addition to the front cover (label) art. That turned out to be quite a bit of work, but I think it was worth the results in the end. When I've had the time, I've been really trying to bring a little bit "extra" to each manual that I work on. It'd be much easier just to dump them all into a generic template, but with all the work the programmers put into their games, I think they deserve better. My favorite illustration for Gingerbread Man is on the back cover: I really like the expression on his face, and that the illustration suggests a story. The trail of crumbs leading away is part of that story, although in hindsight, it's a little ambiguous. I meant it to show that something had just bitten him, and was leaving a trail of crumbs away from him. But after finishing it, I realized it also looks like something bit him a little while ago, and he's been leaving a trail of crumbs behind him as he's limping along. Either way, he's not happy about it. If there was a caption for this, it would have to be "Bite me." This was the last one I finished, and by the time I got to it, I'd gotten pretty good at drawing and shading him, and I think he looks very "gingerbready". I also came up with a neat trick for figuring out how to draw a flat character like this. I traced his outline onto a piece of card stock, and then cut him out - like a paper doll. Then I twisted that into the pose I needed, held it out in front of me, and used that as reference. It really helped to see what a flat character like this was actually capable of doing, and it forced me not to cheat too much, which helped to keep it believable. The reflection is an easy effect in Photoshop. If anyone's interested, I'll post a "how-to" on it. What really makes it work, is having the trail of crumbs crossing over it. That establishes where the floor is, even though you never actually see the floor itself. (And each crumb has its own reflection, too.) One difference between this artwork and Elevators Amiss, is the use of self-colored lines. This is something that I first noticed in animation, where instead of outlining everything with black, they'd use a color similar to what the filled areas would have. This makes the lines disappear a bit more, and gives more depth to an image. I can put together a "how-to" on that, as well, if anyone wants to know more about it. There are a couple of tricks to it that I had to figure out to get it to work right.

Well, I was working on something completely unrelated... and decided to throw together another entry (or two) for the Q*bert b*nQ contest. The other project I'm working on (another label and manual) is much more abstract, and uses flat, geometric shapes for the most part. So I decided to try that for b*nQ, seeing as how the approach is pretty much the opposite of what I already submitted. The colors aren't as intense as in my earlier entry. Also, with a lighter background, there's less contrast. The end result, is that although all of the shapes have hard edges, it still has a "soft" look to it. As I mentioned in the other post's comments - contests are a good opportunity to experiment, and do something that I normally wouldn't do. There are some really good entries in the contest already, so it'll be interesting to see who wins. I like Renato Brito's entries the best, so far. But Gray West's has a lot going for it, too. What I'm debating doing at this point, is submitting additional versions of my existing illustrations using a stock 7800 label template - to make it look like an "Atari" cart. It seems a little cheap to do that, but you never know what a programmer is going to like...

Well, I wasn't originally planning to enter the Q*bert b*nQ label contest, for a couple of reasons. First, because I felt that Q*bert had been done to death. Not the original game (see also here) - which I've always liked - but the property. Q*bert was everywhere in the early 80's, even having his own TV show. So he's been drawn on various advertisements, products, game re-makes, and quilts for 25 years, and I didn't really think I could come up with anything particularly different. Second, I'd just wrapped up the Gingerbread Man manual illustrations, and if I were to do a Q*bert b*nQ entry, I'd likely do it in the same clean-line, airbrushy style I used for that, and frankly, I've done enough of that in the last couple of weeks. (I really like the way the manual turned out, and it was a lot of fun to do, but it was also a ton of work.) But then I thought, maybe I could do something less literal, and more abstract. Initially, I was thinking cubism (for obvious reasons), but that would take too much work to make it convincing. So instead, I sat down with Painter (which I've used before on the Conquest of Mars and Rainbow Invaders labels), and decided just to paint something as loose and fast as I could. Not make a literal interpretation of the game, but just a quick representation of it, and see what happened. So, within a couple of minutes, I had this: Turns out, I liked it. It was bright and vivid, a bit different, yet still obviously Q*bert. So I cleaned it up a bit, finished up the details, and adjusted the composition to fit within a label. This is the final piece - the outline shows the part that I submitted for the Q*bert b*nQ label contest: Up next, I have to do the final text corrections in the Gingerbread Man manual, and then I have yet another label and manual to do. But that one's going to be way different...

Thanks to Albert, my blog is fixed! He was able to update the AA database to re-link all of my image files to their new server. Very cool. This also fixes all of the linked images that I've left scattered throughout the rest of the forums as well. So it's nice to have all of that taken care of. Thanks Albert! And, all of this is just in time to show a sneak-peek at the label I just finished for Batari's Gingerbread Man! Enjoy!

Recently, I had the good fortune to win the Elevators Amiss label contest. I say good fortune, because in addition to some really good labels from other entrants, I was having no luck coming up with an idea for the label, until the last day of the contest. Finally, the idea of having the maid falling into the elevator shaft and clinging onto the cable struck me, and after a half-dozen sketches, I finally came up with this one: There are a few things that are kind of odd about the sketch. Her mouth is skewed, and her neck is a bit... broken. Or at least very uncomfortable. But hey - it's a cartoon. And some of the lines are a little rough. But these are things that I can fix in the computer. In the old days (when I had to walk to art school eight miles in the snow, uphill, both ways) I used to have to re-draw that stuff until I got it right. Erasing, re-tracing, wasting paper, killing trees, that sort of thing. Since everything in the background was going to be straight lines, I didn't see any point in drawing those on paper (except as a rough guide), so I decided I'd do the majority of the rest of the illustration in FreeHand. Incidentally, Adobe has now officially killed FreeHand development, so it looks like at some point, I'll have to switch to Illustrator. (Although, oddly enough, they're still willing to sell it.) Bunch of jerks. Anyway, FreeHand is extremely good at making straight lines. I can set vanishing points on a guide layer, and then build the illustration from there. Once I had traced the maid cartoon in FreeHand as well, I could also "turn" her in perspective slightly, to give a better sense of foreshortening, that was lacking in my original cartoon. The background is bigger than what I was going to need for the final label, but I generally do that anyway for a couple of reasons. First, it allows me more flexibility when figuring out the final composition. I can move stuff around to a greater degree. Second, all labels need about 1/4" bleed all the way around so they can be trimmed after printing. This is something that I think most people don't pay attention to, but probably should, since some artwork is very difficult to add a bleed to after the fact, and printers are simply not accurate enough to print right to the edge of a pre-cut label sheet. Also, the manual covers are different proportions than the cartridge labels - so making the artwork oversized helps adjust for that, too. And for Elevators Amiss, I re-used the cover art (with a different cartoon of the maid) for the interior of the manual as well. Once the line art was done, I exported it to Photoshop, and painted the whole thing. This went pretty fast, since there's not a lot of detail to the illustration, except in the maid, which took the longest. This is the final label, with bleed: It's changed slightly from the contest version. I moved the AA logo a little bit, added the AtariVox logo, and made a couple of other minor tweaks. About the same time as the Elevators Amiss contest was going on, I also got tapped to do the manual for Encaved. I approached this one a little differently. The entire illustration was started in FreeHand. I sketched the hands (yes, those are my hands - and if RPS ever gets finished, they'll be in that game, too), then created the other elements around them. Simon provided a rough sketch of the layout he wanted, so I followed that pretty closely. Since it's a fairly simple layout, the key to making it work was in adding detail where there wasn't any. Simon gave me the following instructions: For Encaved, I wanted a more moody, less cartoony look. So instead of just painting line art in Photoshop, I decided to use Painter instead, and eliminate the outlines. So to start with, I made the different elements into layers, and applied a flat color to them in FreeHand. Then, I was able to take these layers into Painter, and begin painting over them. The nice thing about working this way, is that each layer only has one individual object on it (like the top of the PDA, or one of the walls), and I was able to load each object with its own selection mask. This masks out everything but what I want to paint on, so it won't bleed out into other areas. To get the lighting on the hands to look right, I simply set a small flashlight on my desk, and pointed it at each of my hands while painting them. Fortunately, my right hand was pretty much in that position the whole time anyway, since I was using a graphics tablet. For the maze, I wanted it to seem dark and damp, as if it were underground and water was staining the walls, with the only source of light being from the PDA. I think this is one of those things you could just keep adding more and more details to (pockmarks, rust, slime, rebar, graffiti) but since I still had the manual to do, and the manual for Elevators Amiss, this is as far as I could go with it. It's just as well though, since I ended making a couple more Encaved illustrations for the manual, and adding more detail to the label would have meant adding more detail everywhere, and at some point, Albert needed to actually ship these games. This is the final label, again with bleed:

What are meetings good for? Sketching, of course! Some of my favorite drawings have come in the form of spur-of-the-moment little sketches that I've done while waiting for meetings to end. I'd been thinking about Fred's SuperBug game on the 2600, and started sketching VW bugs. I don't know if he's planning a contest for the label or not, but I hope so. I've loved drawing cars since I was a kid, and the bug is probably the most fun car to draw, from a cartoonist's perspective. So here are a few quick sketches. Not cleaned up. Unrefined. Just raw, uncooked cartoons. This was the first one, and still my favorite. Reminiscent of 70's hot rod cartoons with the oversized engine in it: Back view - wide and low: And just a quick "cute" version: Also, I tend to draw cartoons based on stuff going on in the meetings. One proverbial "can of worms" that keeps getting opened up again and again is our eventual move to HD video. So of course, I drew a can of "HD Brand Worms". There was just something appealing about the two worms admiring their "high-def-ness", and the third being completely disinterested in the whole thing. It's always fun when you're able to infuse personality into something so simple. The original sketch is quite small. It's easier to hide what you're drawing that way.

First things first - Happy New Year! Yeah, okay, I'm a little late with that. I've been on vacation for a few weeks, after having wrapped up the projects mentioned in my last entry. The games seem to be reaching the hands of their owners at last (I don't envy the task Albert had in putting all of the orders together), and I hope everyone enjoys them! Being involved with various aspects of some of these games (sprites and other artwork) I generally play them quite a lot before they hit the store. I decided some time ago, if I didn't enjoy playing a game, I wouldn't be involved with it. This brings me to the subject of this blog. "Dave". Not any one Dave, but just the fact that there seem to be so many Daves involved with the Atari scene right now. Here are just a few that I've bumped into or worked with on recent projects: Dave Weavil - Phantom II/Pirate programmer Dave Neuman - Space Battle programmer Dave Vazquez - Medieval Mayhem label/manual artist Dave Exton - label/manual artist for Toyshop Trouble (and more games than I can count) Dave Dries - artist for Wolfenstein VCS manual and label, and collaborator on Phantom II/Pirate and Space Battle art Space Battle was pretty cool to watch develop. In the weeks nearing its release, the programmer - Dave Neuman - continually refined and polished the game. Improving and balancing the difficulty levels, tweaking the gameplay, refining the features, and stamping out bugs. If you don't regularly frequent the game development forums here - you should. You never know when your suggestions might help improve one of the many homebrews being developed. If a programmer asks for people to test a game and make suggestions - go for it! They may or may not use your idea, but if you never suggest it in the first place, there's no chance of your idea making a difference in how a game turns out. The important thing is - be thoughtful. Don't criticize a game just to bash it. Figure out a way to make it better, and make your suggestions with the intent of helping. And don't take it personally if your suggestions aren't used. In the end, it's still the programmer's game. Not yours. Anyway, onto the next Dave... When I first started working on label artwork for the Space Battle, I knew I wanted to make 3D versions of the ships in the game. But my first pass at an idea was, to put it kindly, cliché. Basically, I just did a straight interpretation of the game, and it was rather lifeless. Also, something else bothered me about it... Since I'd been working with Dave Dries on the manual for Phantom II/Pirate, I asked him what he thought. He pointed out, and rightly so, that I was using the 3D software (Carrara) to dictate the layout, and also that I'd used the exact same perspective on other label ideas before. He suggested I get away from the computer, and draw some rough sketches out on paper to step back from it a little. So I went around looking at some old sci-fi art for inspiration (notably vintage Star Wars posters), and came up with: Once I had that in hand, I felt I had the right idea. An homage to 1970's science fiction art. Fortunately, Dave (Dries) had some spare time and volunteered to create the background art, while I worked on the 3D stuff. I also decided to try something different - to have the cover art wrap all the way around the back of the manual. I sent Dave the sketch, as well as a bunch of reference art, showing what I was going after (do a Google search for "planetscape" sometime, and you'll see what I mean). Within a week, Dave sent me this amazing background painting (done in Photoshop with some help from Cinema 4D): Now it was my job not to screw it up! I used Dave's background to position the 3D models, and establish the lighting. Then I rendered the ships with an alpha channel, so I could composite them into the scene: I made a separate rendering pass of just the engines. These were all individual light sources with a glow effect. Each of these two passes took about 2 1/2 hours to render at the final resolution and quality. Next, in Photoshop, I painted engine exhausts and flames, to help merge the 3D models with the painted backgrounds: When it was all put together, the final image looked like this: This is quite a large image at full size (some 4200 pixels across), and might make a pretty nice poster for the AtariAge store (that's a hint, Albert). The final wraparound cover with logos and such: Dave (Dries) constructed the background so I could pull apart the various elements and re-use them. So I was able to create some nice full-page interiors for the manual, as well. Here they are, minus the final text: Explosion deformers are fun! (The green cylinder is a fuel pod.) The lasers for these were rendered in Carrara as a separate pass, much like the engines, and then composited with everything else in Photoshop. With each label and manual I work on, I try to push things a little further. To try and make the interiors more dynamic and interesting, and try different techniques and styles. Being able to collaborate with Dave (Dries) on the artwork for Phantom II/Pirate and Space Battle was a lot of fun, and it helped me stretch as an artist. Hopefully, we can do some more of that. There are quite a few homebrews slated to come out this year... And speaking of cool new stuff coming out this year... if you haven't had a chance yet, and you're a gadget geek in the slightest, you have to check out Apple's upcoming iPhone. I've never wanted a cell phone before, but I'd actually be willing to plunk down $500 for this one. I'd even be willing to bet that someone named Dave probably worked on it.

I just wrapped up working on the manual for Phantom II / Pirate (coming soon to the AtariAge store). Dave Dries (who did the Wolfenstein VCS artwork) created the excellent artwork for Phantom II, while I worked on the art for Pirate, and laid out the manual (which covers both games). Pirate is basically being included as a bonus game, so the focus of the cover and label is Phantom II. The Pirate stuff is inside the manual. Since you probably won't get to see the Pirate art until you buy the cartridge (and you're going to... right?), I thought I'd go ahead and post it here. Here's the original rough sketch of "Up" Chuck LeDuc, and his faithful zombie parrot: And the finished artwork: I wanted to go for a "wood cut" on parchment look, and I think I managed to capture that. I'm pleased with the way it turned out - still cartoony, but a different look than what I usually do. There's also a treasure chest in the manual, which actually turned out to be more work to do than the pirate: Originally, I was going to add a couple of other things in there as well (a snake, and maybe an overview of the island) but they ended up just not working. No point in forcing something to work that just isn't going to. Plus there's the whole "running out of time" thing. Right now, I'm working (again with Dave) on the Space Battle manual. Dave's a great illustrator and designer (check out his Cinemarcade site sometime), and I usually bounce ideas off him to get some feedback and a fresh look at my stuff anyway. So working with him on these projects is pretty cool, since it's yet another way for me to try new stuff as an artist.

I finally wrapped up my contest entry for Medieval Mayhem, and sent it off to Albert. I spent quite a lot of time on this one, and it'll likely be my only entry (well... three entries, one illustration). This is the pencil drawing. Actually, it's a composite of four pencil drawings: the dragon, the castles on their hilltops, the mountain range and clouds, and the knight up on the wall: The knight was actually a last-minute addition. My other (abandoned) idea was going to use a knight like this one, and I really felt there needed to be something up on that wall. A tower, a flag... something. So the knight got the call. Drawing different elements on different sheets of paper (using a light table) is a holdover from learning animation. It allows me to re-work one thing, without messing up something that's already done. Once I've got sketches I'm happy with, I scan them into Photoshop, and put them together. In the case of the dragon, I cleaned up the lines in FreeHand (a vector-based drawing program) before I started painting. I didn't do that with the rest of the elements, since I wanted them to have more of a rough feel to them. Then it was time to paint. The final file for this illustration (not counting label text to be added later) had 39 layers in it. At least seven of them are just dedicated to fire. The final artwork looks like this: You can see the unfinished edges where the artwork will get cropped before going into the final label design. Because I'm drawing on paper again and scanning it in (instead of just drawing directly in the computer), I ended up working at an extremely high resolution this time. Usually, I start off at maybe 800 x 800 pixels, but this one ended up at 4200 x 4200, which is completely overkill for a 2 3/4" wide label. For example, here's the knight at 100% size: On the final label, he'll maybe be 1/4" across. Oh well. And finally, the finished label: I distorted and offset the letters in the title a bit, to give more of a feeling of "mayhem" to them. It helped them match the energy in the rest of the illustration, too. Just having clean, perfect letters up there wouldn't have worked as well for this design. I kept the dragon very stylized, since pretty early on there were already a lot of realistic (how can a fantasy creature be realistic?) looking dragons with sharp, pointy teeth being submitted. Besides - I'm a cartoonist. Not a photo-realistic illustrator. Go with your strengths, I say. Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. The key turning point was getting the sky to look right. Once that happened, the mood of the scene was set, and that dictated how the rest of the illustration was painted.

I've been working on the manual for Four-Play, which includes the mini-game Knight Jumper. For the Knight Jumper page, I wanted to draw a cartoon chess knight. The first version I attempted (drawn in the computer) was, to put it kindly, awful. I tried re-working it and re-working it, until I finally realized it just wasn't going to work. So, I decided to dig out paper and pencil, and go at it "old-school". And after a few attempts, got something I really liked, which will be the one in the manual. Re-drawing it several times took far less time than trying to force the other one to work did. I'm starting to like drawing in the real world again, rather than in the computer. There's far more control and subtlety available with a pencil and paper than you can get out of even the best software. Drawing is a very tactile process, and I'm beginning to rediscover that. I'm still taking the drawings into the computer to finish them, since I can get better line and shading quality than I can otherwise. Plus it still allows me to fix stuff easily - like the base of the knight. Computers are really good at ellipses. So it's a "best of both worlds", type of thing. Except I really miss having an "undo" when using pencil and paper. I still find myself reaching for command-z all the time. (Incidentally, using a blue pencil to draw is a leftover habit from animating. Blue pencils were originally used by animators so when their artwork was cleaned up later with graphite, the blue lines wouldn't show up when xeroxed onto cels. I just like the subtlety I can get with a blue pencil that I can't with graphite.)