3D Print photos

I am thrilled with how my print has come out! They hold my (year old) business cards in place, and the detail I managed to get in works really well. I can't wait to show them off at expo!

Old artbook backgrounds vs New

As you can see, the older page design, despite being full, felt empty in my opinion. Clear borders weren't there between each piece, and it wasn't clear which way you should read the page.

After introducing the backgrounds, which have a matching colour scheme for each character, the page looks fuller, but not busy. The curve of the shapes trains the eye to go around the page, and the circle around the material section keeps it separate but still in relation. The crow/raven footprints also add a little bit of personality and interest into the background, but don't divert attention away from the actual art.

Artbook Research

I want my artbook for this project to look like a professional, marketable product, that looks like it would really be the artbook for a game. To achieve this, I looked at the layout and structure of several different artbooks: Hearthstone, The Croods, The Good Dinosaur, and Zootropolis were all "The Art  of" that I looked at, but the one I focused on was "The Art of Zootropolis" because I liked the design the most and I thought my project had a similar visual style, with anthropomorphised animals. 

What I found from looking at these artbooks were they had a similar structure: they had a beautiful front cover, with minimal inside pages, and then the first 4-6 pages were also artwork, mostly 2-page spreads. Then they had a page dedicated to the title again, and then a contents and introduction. I followed that structure. The rest of the book flowed naturally, introducing my concept art for each character one after the other. I also got the idea to include the breakdowns of the promotional art from "The Art of Hearthstone", as that book contains the primary sketches of the card art in Hearthstone, and I thought it would be interested to see my painting process. 

Additionally when looking at the Zootropolis artbook, I noticed I liked the minimalist, simple colour backgrounds, like blended a crisp white background with some fun, curved colours. I thought it would be a good way to force the readers eyes in a certain movement, and it also gave each page a nice pop, and the animal print designs were also cute. I would like to implement something like this in my artbook.

Rogue Sculpt Posed

This is the posed version of the rogue sculpt. To achieve this, I utilised the T-pose master feature in the Zplugins menu. I then posed my character, then moved on to creating the plinth that they stand on. I did this by making a thin rectangle for them to stand on, then made one individual brick, copied it to make the brick pattern, then used some brushes to add tertiary details to break up the similarity and make the bricks look more natural, but still stylised.

Then next step was to merge the whole sculpt together, and dynamesh. This was so that afterwards, when decimating and exporting, I could 3D print my sculpt! This is the reason behind the pose: I wanted the sculpt to have a practical purpose, and this sculpt will hold my business cards! 

To assure he was the right size, I quickly modelled a rectangle with the same dimensions of a business card and also loaded that into the slicer program. I made sure the cards would fit under the hands, then printed my model.

Rogue Sculpt Renders

Arranging the Artbook

For making my art book, I am using the Vistaprint ArtBook software from their website. This program allows me to enter text, automatic page numbers, picture effects, and more. This is where I will order my book from, but for the online PDF, I will arrange it in Photoshop and use the Layers > Files script to convert the document into a PDF.

Artbook: Front and Back Cover

Other Promo Art sketches and Paintings

A collection of simple sketches, to full paintings, exploring different characters that could exist in the world of Tails of Magica.

Rogue Turnaround Video

Mage Promo Art and CYMK Version

Warrior Promo Art and CYMK Version