So, quite a while ago, I played the demo for Beacon Pines during one of the Steam Next Fests… and I loved. I fell in love with it. I even did an interview with Matt Meyer from Hiding Spot about the game (I even recorded it. Audio was bad)!
Anyway, the other day, it was “National Coloring Book Day” and I figured I’d participate in this contest that Fellow Traveller (the publisher) and Hiding Spot were hosting on Twitter over here. The idea is to colour in this page depicting Tish, Iggy, Beck and Luca at that scene at the end of the demo.
And like, as mentioned yesterday, I wanted to maybe share it once I’ve submitted it. I figured that I wanted to polish it enough to be able to say that I’m proud of it before sharing any insights. You can see parts of it in my last Drawing Post over here!
The image is a big file so it may be a bit compressed. You can also see it on Twitter over here… although compression may not do me any favours over there either.
The whole thing took me roughly five to six hours, I believe? At first, I struggled with removing the “white” from the original picture but it seems that you can simply remove white with something called “alpha” in Krita. I don’t what exactly the thing is called but it’s somewhere where the Layers and Colours are. Anyway, I then created different layer groups for each character, grabbing some reference pictures and adding in the colours to roughly what they are in the game. Obviously, I didn’t want to copy the game completely, so I brightened and darkened some of the selections from the colour picker.
The next step was adding the Hiding Spot logo to Luca’s shirt (little guy on the left). This took me a few minutes as I wasn’t sure about the angle. It’s not the logo, actually, as I not only wanted to add it in as a little easter egg but I also wanted to make it an OwO…
Anyway, I then made the tree stump dark brown and added grey to the fence there. Yup, that didn’t take long.
I also made the “flowers” or “butterflys” purple, then added a bit of blue to them in the form of lines and then eventually, I added a bit of a light cyan to them with the “colour dodge” blending mode which turned it into this mutated blue colour of sorts… It looks pretty cool if I do say so myself!
Then, I made a whole group of layers for the background. The ground is pretty brown technically and the background is this toxic green of sorts. There is a puddle in front of the stump that I turned into a very bright “toxic”-looking green shade with some layers styles to make the ooze more mysterious, similar to the mystery that it offers in the game!
Next up, I essentially messed with the background, adding a bit of purple, blue, pink, and other colours to the ground with varying opacities and layer styles, to create this “still green looking but it’s night time so it’s blue” look. The sky/background is a mix of purple, pink, blue, more purple, and then I also added this cyan colour with the saturation blending mode at some point. It creates the nova-looking effect there when you use texturing brushes and when you don’t cover everything. Later, I sprinkled stars into the mix but tried to keep the big ones to a select few because of how bright they actually look.
At last, the actual hard part. Shading and Lighting. As mentioned previously in that other post from yesterday, lighting is rough!
So, for the shading, I choose to shade with a dark blue colour in a Multiply layer, adding shadows to the backside of the characters and anything that isn’t facing the ooze. Tish’s (the rhino’s) hat, for instance, is bright on the bottom but dark on the top. At the same time, her horn is dark but a lot of the rest of her face are bright because of depth. The arm is illuminated at the front side but the fingers (curled towards back) are in the dark. This was difficult to achieve and it took the majority of my time but it was well worth it as it turned out really well.
The other part is the lighting. Usually, when I shade, I don’t need to add “lighting” as the shadows themselves show where light is. “Where there’s light, there’s shadows!” – Anyway, the bright parts, naturally, stand out because of where the shadows are, as you can see on the right here where I disabled the “ooze lighting” that is giving Tish some extra light. The reason why I added the extra blue light though is that I wanted to challenge myself and try that out… but also, it looks seriously cool. When I imagined this, it looked pretty creepy. Turns out, it is really creepy!
For comparison, here’s also the view without the shading. Tish just looks “flat”. 2D is probably a better term here. Without the shading, you can’t tell where there’s a depth. With the shading, I can basically dictate where depth is supposed to be!
And well, it’s the same for the others. Beck is a challenge because Beck is a black cat… and I basically used a very dark blue for her… so the shading doesn’t stand out quite as much but the lighting does even more so and because of how our brain works, we can look at the shirt and see that there’s shadows, so naturally, we try to see the shadows at the top of her head as well, in theory at least.
Iggy was incredibly fun to draw. The pants were a challenge, actually, but like, the lighting and shading here worked really well, in my opinion.
And well, obviously, I added some blue to the Beacon Pines logo, giving it a bit of that “Outer Wilds – Echoes of the Eye” feel, in a way. I also added lighting and colour to the stump making it look more purple-ish in the process but it’s still successful and you can see what it looks like from that. At last, I also was bothered by the lack of shadows so I added slight shadows to the four characters that one can barely see but if you do, you’ll appreciate them, lol.
Anyway, I’m super proud of how this turned out and I had a lot of fun challenging myself. Looking forward to exploring more Drawing Shenanigans in the future!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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