(Insert stupid Blog name here) - Encavedavators Amiss

RSS Bot · June 21, 2007

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 her apron strings 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:

QUOTEI envision a view into a 3D corridor which is mainly dark grey and black. The walls should be very straight to show the cold atmosphere of a maze constructed from concrete. A minimalistic design should fit perfectly. In the front of the picture should be two arms holding the PDA which shows a screenshot of the game.

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:

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