On January 7th, 2009, Udon Entertainment announced a contest involving Capcom’s fighting videogame series, Darkstalkers. It was to be a tribute artbook for the series and fans were asked to submit artwork based on the videogame. The game is known to have very unique and memorable characters. Being a graphic designer, I haven’t really hand-drawn anything in forever so I figured I should enter. Whether I made the cut or not, at least I get to hone my illustrative skills in the process.
I ended up choosing Lilith Aensland, the other succubus in the game (The other being Morrigan Aensland). I should’ve chosen another character as she is one of the more popular ones. I think I spent roughly a month on it (on and off). I originally wanted to keep the original pencil lines and jump into coloring in Photoshop. It didn’t really turn out too well and I didn’t really feel like going back to sharpen up the lines. So I placed it in Illustrator and painstakingly traced over the artwork while adding some weight to the lines. I also edited some parts within Illustrator so the final is a bit different from the original pencil sketch.
After the lines were done, it was time to lay down the colors. Before I did any coloring in Photoshop, I laid out the base colors in Illustrator. They’re basically large blocks of color underneath the lines. Then I would import the lines into Photoshop as a separate layer then import the blocks of color separately under that layer. So each block of color had its own layer. Some blocks of color were grouped since having a bunch of layers is a real mess for me.
Once all the pieces were set, it was time to do some shading and highlighting. There isn’t really much to say about this part only that I spent the most time on it. I had to do everything with a mouse since I still haven’t invested in a tablet yet. Getting some shading and highlighting in some parts took a lot of patience. I had to constantly go in and redo it until it looked just right. I added the bat graphic for the background but now that I look at it, it looks like an afterthought. But its there and I already submitted my work.
The final size was 8.5″x11″ at 400dpi in CMYK color mode. The resulting work area in Photoshop was 3400×4400. Those settings were required for the contest (except for the color mode) and if you were chosen, you had to send a .tiff version of your artwork.
The contest ended on March 1st and over two thousand entries were submitted. 2072 entries to be exact. Pretty insane. So making the cut was pretty slim. And drawing a popular character made that chance even slimmer. Winners were announced on March 13th, and unfortunately, I didn’t make the cut. Roughly 170-plus entries were chosen out of 2072. I saw some incredible (like ridiculously incredible) artwork that got rejected so competition must’ve been fierce.
In the end, I had a lot of fun and I’m pretty glad that I participated.
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
If you want to visually see what I went through, you can do so here:
[Stages of my artwork for the Darkstalkers Tribute book]
Yes, I want you guys to read first before seeing the artwork itself. That’s why the link is at the end of the post =)
Tags: artbook, darkstalkers, donkeybeatz, fan art, lilith, tribute, udon