Spacefarer's Guide Redesign and New Pages

Today I am happy to share (what I hope is) the FINAL FORM of the Spacefarer's Guide to Intergalactic Pests!  It’s been a blast making drawings for the book, something I’ve been doing in the evenings before bed. (Nothing like going to sleep with alien horrors on the brain…)

I will be sharing more of these each month as I get them written. (The writing is always the time-consuming part for me.) With any luck I'll be able to send the book off to the printers by summer.

So why the redesign? What was wrong with the old design?? 

Truthfully, nothing was wrong with the old design. I quite liked it for what it was. But I had gotten really burned out on digital work last year, and the old design leaned heavily on digitally painted color work. After doing research on Generative AI and what companies like Adobe were up to, I wanted to shift away from digital, and this project had been ENTIRELY digital. I had a moment of despair in there where I thought, maybe I just drop this one altogether...

But I really loved the little world that was developing and I felt like I hadn't quite managed to capture it and the creatures in it the way I wanted. So I went back to my roots, and started doing everything in pencil. ...and I LOVED IT. But it did necessitate a change in the design in order to accommodate traditional pencil.

The design is really simple, for the drawings I just take a flat cutout of the character drawing, and then a little color spot added over it. (Sometimes I do this color spot layer in col-erase pencils). Then I combine these and drop them into the book. It's really simple, and the digital part is only about 5% of the overall work, which feels great right now.

I'm not sure how I will translate these to assets for the game yet, and I don't care. I am just having fun with them and for now am focusing exclusively on work for the printed book. We can sort out how to make them work in the game later.

AI has made me reevaluate a lot of things, and my biggest takeaway is to get back to basics, and for me, that means break out the pencils and DRAW DRAW DRAW!