Drawing for Games - 30/1

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Our focus in this session was composition and practice for splash art.

To begin with, we looked at the pipeline for thumbnail creation used by an artist working on splash art for League of Legends. His process provided valuable insight into the importance of clear thumbnailing for visual read and storytelling. It stressed the value of putting more thought into the beginning of a drawing, and how taking more care in exploring pose, value, and mood can increase and change readability to tell a variety of stories.

Taking this extra time to explore is not often something I undertake, normally I begin with a clear vision and the finished artwork will be relatively true to that vision. This way of approaching composition, thinking actively about elements such as the Rule Of Thirds, has only been part of my process for artwork which will be marked through an exam board and up until now has not permeated to personal artwork.

The exercise was to take a character, pre-existing or imagined, and ultimately create rough thumbnails for splash art featuring them. The first step was to jot down notes about said character, this included personality traits, trials, beliefs, and alike. The purpose of this extra step instead of immediate pen to paper was to think about storytelling – how much of this can we communicate visually?

Joel Miller from The Last Of Us, a game developed by Naughty Dog and released on PlayStation in 2022, has deep connections to other characetrs and a rich story to pick elements from. His attachment to the main accompanying character Ellie and his role as her protector sparked ideas instantly.

Look at him having a lovely time playing golf! 😊

After easing into the exercise it became easier, and soon I had 9 rough thumbnails. Some of these compositions are not ones I would have come up with if I had skipped what I now believe to be a crucial part of the process. My personal favourite out of what I have created is number 4; I believe it has a nice balance of perspective and clarity, featuring an interesting light source and multiple story beats, including them actually travelling through post-apocalypse cities and hinting at the underground sections.

Something I struggled with during this exercise is the visualisaton of the extreme perspective that has become synonymous with League of Legends style splash art. Coming up with different and interesting ways to push perspective was a challenge and an element of thumbnailing I would like to become more comforatble with. In future I will start by warming up from drawing these perspectives from reference, before moving on to freehand sketching.

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