HebrewMore character portraits and chapter art for the new content in The Hunger Games Adventures. Previous updates are here and here.
Have a lovely weekend,
Aviv
Archive for the ‘Work’ Category
The Hunger Games Adventures #3
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
The Hunger Games Adventures – Portraits and Scenes
Sunday, April 22nd, 2012Last week I showed some portraits of the first characters the player meets in Funtactix’ “The Hunger Games Adventures“. Here are a few more portraits, of “generic” people from District 12, and of lovely Effie and Cinna from the Capitol:
In addition to portraits, I’ve also been working on illustrations that appear before each chapter in the game, giving a hint of what’s happening in it. Here are the illustrations for chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6:
I’d like to give kudos to the Funtactix team – and in my case especially to Amir Lotan, the product manager in charge of the game, who works closely with me despite the time difference between Israel and New York. He knows how to explain exactly what he needs, and adds references, helpful examples and even rough mockups sometimes. Moreover, he has the ability to pinpoint the problems in a sketch and to give the right direction to solve them. It’s easier for clients who are part of the industry and understand the art and gaming world, but it still shouldn’t be taken for granted, and it makes my work much easier and more pleasant.
Aviv
The Hunger Games Adventures – District 12
Sunday, April 15th, 2012“The Hunger Games Adventures”, the Facebook game by Israeli game company Funtactix, based on the movie by Lionsgate, is online for over a week now, and I can start showing some stuff I created for it. My part was mainly character design and illustration, and the rest of the art (environments, items, 3D, UI design) is the work of Funtactix’s very talented designers, both in Israel and overseas.
The first step was coming up with a general look for characters in the game, and when that was approved I created head designs for all the characters, based on references from the movie. In the end, the characters’ look in the game is pretty different from the original design, and either way, since this is concept art, I’m still checking whether I can even show these pieces.
After capturing each character’s essence into a relatively simple head design (it has to be clear on a small avatar in the game), I started working on painted portraits, which appear when the player interacts with another character, for example when given a new quest. Here are the first four character the player meets in the first act: Katniss, Peeta, Gale and Primrose.
All the art for the game had to be approved by Funtactix (obviously) and by Lionsgate as well, but the main characters’ portraits also required approval by the actors themselves, so Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and other fine folk reviewed my art on its way to the game. Cool. Cool, cool cool.
Speaking of stardust: the Hollywood launch was decorated with big-ass prints of the poster I drew. Can’t really take full credit for this poster, because it’s actually a paintover: I got the composition all set on a huge Photoshop file, with the mockingjay in the background and Katniss in front of it, and worked on top of that to get the art style of the game, and to turn real-Katniss into game-Katniss. It’s still pretty damn cool to see it every time I play the game on Facebook.
There’s new content being added to the game all the time, so check it out!
Aviv
Toysmart
Monday, March 5th, 2012Most of my work lately was for digital games, mostly for Facebook. But I also had a couple of projects with Toysmart, An Israeli games company that produces board and card games. They asked me to do art for two new games, for the annual boardgames expo in Essen, Germany.
Note: All the images in the post belong to Toysmart and cannot be used in any way.
Sounds like teen spirit
The first is “Voca”, a card game where the players need to make sounds that fit their cards. I drew three templates for the different sound categories, and the client created all the various cards by leaving one element in full color and the rest in black and white. I work in Photoshop, and here’s a short process:
1. First sketch to get the composition and poses:
2. After the first sketch the client clarified that they were looking for some “character”, not just straightforward animal illustrations.
3. After the sketch was approved, I moved on to ink, using my trusty Wacom and Photoshop’s most basic brush with size jitter set to Pen Pressure.
4. This would usually be the “flatting” step, where I fill in solid colors as preparation for coloring, but I forgot to save a screenshot of it, so here’s the final card:
And the two other template cards:
And finally, the box illustration:
Mazes and Dragons
In the second game, “Mazy”, the players place terrain tiles, similar to Carcassonne. I didn’t create all the final tiles here as well, but rather drew a bunch of elements that the client could mix’n’match to create all the tiles they desire: the background, divided to land and sea in various shapes; “decoration” elements that are actually part of the background; roads and bridges tiles, that create the connection between tiles during the game; and dragons, which as I understand were originally meant to be part of the gameplay, but ended up as visual and thematic elements that tie the whole thing together.
And again, a box illustration:
You can see another project I did for Toysmart in my gallery, for a game titled Elsewhere.
Aviv
The Hunger Games Game
Saturday, March 3rd, 2012It’s been awfully quiet here, I know. It’s about 3 months into my new life as a freelance illustrator, and so far I’m finding it pretty hard to focus on personal projects outside of work. Fortunately, I can now start showing some of the stuff I’ve been working on.
…Like “The Hunger Games Adventures”, a Facebook social game based on the movie based on the book, by Israeli game company Funtactix, who also brought the Mission Impossible game to Facebook a few months ago.
It’s been a pleasure working with them, but not being able to show anything or tell anyone in the process was fairly frustrating, especially since the work was so much fun. But now the official game poster is up on MTV.com, so I assume it’s safe to show it here as well: Hunger Games Adventures poster on MTV.
I hope I’ll be able to show more stuff soon. Regardless, I’m really excited about both the movie and the game, coming out this month!
Aviv
