Elli CG Process

So this is a process of a set of CGs from Elliot's route. 

Starting here, with the concept art. I will say this was one of my least favorite concept artists and we didn't work with her long. I found that the quality of work we got from her did not at all align with her public portfolio. and there were way too many anatomy flaws for her concept art to be much use for me. I was spending more time correcting issues than I was just translating the images into my style.

I personally think it's really important for freelance artists to make sure their portfolios accurately represent their day-to-day skill and ability rather than representing the very best of the best of their work. I believe she did three CG concepts for us before I decided we wouldn't continue working with her. 

Concept art doesn't have to be perfect - that isn't the point. But, for our purposes, I stressed to people that I needed something accurate enough for me to be able to build the CGs off of. If I have to make so many corrections I'm essentially re-drawing and re-working the whole thing, I may as well have just drawn the concept myself based on my mental image.

For the first part of the CG, I mostly kept it similar to the concept art. Aside from reworking into my style and giving the characters more realistic proportions, I also switched the cheek Elliot's hand is on. Not sure why - I just liked it better on Nora's near cheek.

The actual forehead kiss part, I changed a bit more. In the concept art, it looks like Elliot shifts his entire body position rather than just sort of leaning forward. I tried to alter it so he's really just leaning his head forward a bit to kiss her - not only does this keep me from having to redraw, re-flat and re-shade his entire body it also just looks more like what you'd naturally do in this situation.

I didn't capture the image with flats but that's obviously the next stage - once I get my lines more or less set in, I go in and lay flat colors down. With CG pairs like this - I try to reuse as much coloring as I can for the sake of speed and continuity. But how much I can re-use kind of depends on how the CG is changing.

In this one, I was able to re-use all of Nora's coloring but I had to rework a lot of Elliot's to make it work with his head shifting position.

Even though I'm posting it now - the bottom version isn't quite finished yet. You'll notice Elli's earrings are missing and I still have to make some adjustments to his shading.

Both of these are significantly larger than the game dimensions (which are 1280x720) so i need to decide how much I want to crop them in. The full versions will, of course, be in the art book.