Monday, July 12, 2010

Art of Capcom 2 Poster

Udon is also releasing another Art of Capcom book this year. I had the pleasure of contributing a double page splash for it and I decided to draw every character from the Street Fighter, Darkstalker, Rival Schools and Final Fight games. Below is a few samples of the step by step I did to get it done.



This took me waaay too long to do. There is over 110 characters I believe and I don't think I'll do one of these again. We also had to make it a themed piece and I decided to choose the Olypmics as they happened to be in Canada this year.

I started the process digitally. Roughing out quickly a picture flow so your eye would read left to right and back into the picture. I decided to do a line up as this was an easy way to show all of the characters. It also avoided me having to draw every face or full body as there just wasn't enough time for all that.

Once I laid in a rough layout, I printed it out on separate pages and traced over the rough poses, dropping in characters here and there. I started with big characters first placing them in easy to read areas, then filled in the spots with misc characters trying to avoid possible color conflicts.

Then came the fine tuning of the pencils. Little by little I roughed it all in, double checking references for all the characters making sure I got everyone. I also added misc characters that I thought would be a fun addition for the die hard fans. Just around the same time, they were announcing Super Street Fighter 4 so I had to make sure Juri was in it.

Once I cleaned all the pencils up, I began flatting this monster and also had to draw in a background registration building of sorts. Initially it was going to be for Vancouver registration but I decided to just generalize it and go with Capcom instead. I think it made more sense too.



Funny enough, I thought I was done but then they go and announce Hakan as the last new character for SSF4! So I had to quickly go back in and add him, replacing Chun Li's rump with him.

All in all, I had a lot of fun working on it. It was a massive undertaking though so I hope you all like it... see if you can find them all!;)

Cheers!

VENT


Udon is finally releasing it's first creator owned anthology called VENT. For more information about it, see the official press release here - VENT

This is very exciting for me as this will be the first published work of Aardehn! I have a short, full color 5 page story in the book which will coincide with my current storyline but can also be read as a one off, for those of you who don't follow along with my online comic.

Alongside my pages, I contributed a poster with a tutorial on how I created this piece. This is just a sample of the tutorial, but rest assured a full write up and more images are included. I also have a 6 page gallery of misc Aardehn artwork.

The hardcover is only available at SDCC and a few other shows I believe but you can already pre-order the soft cover here - link

Hope you guys enjoy it and would love to hear your feedback on it all.

Cheers!