"Crabrat" hi-res Spread & Process Guide

Since I began work on the Martian of the Month series, I have worked to try and find a purely digital way to concept, sketch, draw, and paint the characters. This decision, to make the whole Martian series without the help of any traditional materials such as graphite pencils, was done with the idea that it would lead to an increase in the overall speed of production. It would also make corrections and alterations easier while eliminating the need to cut out any VILE masks. Importantly, it would also unify the art so that it all blended together seamlessly in the digital format the game is in. It seemed like a good idea!

But the truth about pencil is, the very limitations that make pencil so much slower and more cumbersome than digital, are the exact ones that lead to more interesting results. Pencil is slower, true, but this very slowness is what gives the artist more time to carefully consider new ideas for details and interesting alterations. Pencil is annoying to erase when mistakes are made, true, but this potential hazard makes the artist much more careful and thoughtful in their decision-making. And pencil is messy and and chaotic, with accidental smudges and dust and scratches that occur, also true, but this same random chaos is makes for more happy little accidents that the artist can take advantage of, something the artist might never encounter if working in a purely digital medium.

In short, the results are more interesting when I paint over a traditional drawing. So what to do?

The CRABRAT is a creature I have made a few digital versions of as I've tried unsuccesfully to get it right...

To my frustration, these digital versions just never worked. (It's a cool idea! It's a crab and a rat! There is no reason this shouldn't work!!!)

In the page of creature drawings shown above, I finally landed on version that was IT. It nailed it! But I felt I couldn't use it, because doing so would mean working over a pencil drawing which would break so many of my internal design rules. Initially, I tried to do a separate digital drawing to paint over, to keep things consistent. I still feel like this is a good idea, but had to admit after several failures, that it never managed to convey the magic of the pencil version. So I finally scrapped my digital drawings and just started painting over my original pencil drawing, leaving the struggle of cutting out a tedious mask to be solved by Future-Justin. (I wouldn't want to be that guy!)

The results turned out to be very positive and surprisingly, it all came together really fast. (It just feels so good to paint over traditional pencil!!!) I made a little Process Guide to see what the major stages were that it went through as it developed and thought I'd share that here. The only nightmare for this one was going from stage 3 to 4, where I (now Future-Justin) finally had to pay the price for Past-Justin's lack of consideration and planning. I HATE masking, but found that some of the new brushes I've made helped that move faster than expected. (I will share them next month when I have fully tested them!)

Overall, I really liked how this turned out. I feel SO much better about this design and character than the original version! It leaves me with a lot of questions on how to proceed in the future with these. Is going all-digital just going to be ultimately unsatisfying for me? Am I ruining good character ideas with bad execution, just for the sake of the digital format? Maybe graphite is something I just can't quit. And maybe instead of finding a replacement, I should focus more on finding better ways of incorporating it.

Lots to think about, but before I get carried away and start making any grand declarations, I want to try this process again on a few more creatures. I want to make sure I can repeat the success I found here, and that I didn't just get lucky on this one. With that in mind, I will be posting a poll in the upcoming May Roadmap to choose which subject will be next in this experiment!