I think your tutorial is the best I've found on the net for drawing spaceship art, and I've wasted many, many hours trying to find at least one good tutorial on this subject.
I'm in the earliest stages of designing a 4x game using MMF2, gimp, and audacity. Unfortunately, I'm not an artist so my original artwork really, really stinks (original ship 1 below). As a result, I needed to scour the net to find a tutorial on how to improve my 2D overhead ship art. I'm trying to create reasonable (my goal is just to create reasonable, passable art that would work in a game like MOO2/3, Distant Worlds, Reach for the Stars, etc...).
What I'm hoping for here is if you could point out what I'm doing wrong. I'm attaching 5 png images; these are based on 210 X 210 pixels in gimp size. This is the smallest capital ship in one alien' fleet. Here's the background:
original ship1 (first pic from top to bottom): This was my original, unskilled, game art that I came up with on my own. Obviously, this stinks and would be unacceptable for any modern quality-based 4x game such as those I referenced above. This image was done *before* I read your tutorial, and was the basis for search to improve my game artistry ability. As of now, I look at it (and the 29 other progressions of it) as concept art for one of my alien races (I have 30 races planned for my game). At this point, I didn't know anything about greyscales, overlays, airbrushing, and shading.
grayscale ship1 (2nd image): After stumbling upon and carefully reading your tutorial, this was is my revised ship based upon completion of step 2 in your tutorial (I also had to figure out what shading, greyscales, overlays, and the other things you mentioned were). Something is still lacking here, but I can't quite put my finger on it: I used grayscale only, shading, and the airbrush tool from gimp with a scattered setting, also a few lines (the pencil tool from gimp).
color layer ship 1 (3rd image): Originally, I wanted this race ship style to have a blue and green theme like the concept art, hence I used a light blue overlay layer that corresponds to step 4 of your tutorial.
color layer2 ship1 (4th image): This corresponds to the color and burn layer of step 5 in your tutorial. I used a seperate overlay with some patterns that were supplied with gimp. The bright red lines for engines, guns correspond to the light layers and highlights of steps 6 & 7 in your tutorial. I haven't got the hang of this yet. As you can see, my hightlights lack the color and vividity of your highlights, so I'm also doing something wrong here; I can't quite put my finger on it at this time.
ship1 final (5th image at bottom): This was my final design based upon joining all the overlays. I "played" with many combinations of opacity, using the different addition, multiplication, difference, burn, grain extract, etc... and basically just stumbled upon this brown color variation which I liked best. However, when I compared it to yours final design, I still see that I'm lacking something somewhere. Whether the final ship theme is blue or brown doesn't really matter to me, as long as the art is good.
I'm not happy with my step 3 final greyscale, which is lacking something in relation to yours, if you can give me some idea what I'm either doing wrong, or failing to do here this would be great? Also, my "highlights" step lacks the vividity of your work, I don't know what I'm doing wrong here? Anything else that you think of that I need to do, or do differently, would be of great help for my artistic endeavors.
Thanks a lot for your very useful tutorial. I can see a 100% improvement from my original work to what I have now just based upon learning your tutorial, but I'm still not quite there yet.
Hello Skorpio:
I think your tutorial is the best I've found on the net for drawing spaceship art, and I've wasted many, many hours trying to find at least one good tutorial on this subject.
I'm in the earliest stages of designing a 4x game using MMF2, gimp, and audacity. Unfortunately, I'm not an artist so my original artwork really, really stinks (original ship 1 below). As a result, I needed to scour the net to find a tutorial on how to improve my 2D overhead ship art. I'm trying to create reasonable (my goal is just to create reasonable, passable art that would work in a game like MOO2/3, Distant Worlds, Reach for the Stars, etc...).
What I'm hoping for here is if you could point out what I'm doing wrong. I'm attaching 5 png images; these are based on 210 X 210 pixels in gimp size. This is the smallest capital ship in one alien' fleet. Here's the background:
original ship1 (first pic from top to bottom): This was my original, unskilled, game art that I came up with on my own. Obviously, this stinks and would be unacceptable for any modern quality-based 4x game such as those I referenced above. This image was done *before* I read your tutorial, and was the basis for search to improve my game artistry ability. As of now, I look at it (and the 29 other progressions of it) as concept art for one of my alien races (I have 30 races planned for my game). At this point, I didn't know anything about greyscales, overlays, airbrushing, and shading.
grayscale ship1 (2nd image): After stumbling upon and carefully reading your tutorial, this was is my revised ship based upon completion of step 2 in your tutorial (I also had to figure out what shading, greyscales, overlays, and the other things you mentioned were). Something is still lacking here, but I can't quite put my finger on it: I used grayscale only, shading, and the airbrush tool from gimp with a scattered setting, also a few lines (the pencil tool from gimp).
color layer ship 1 (3rd image): Originally, I wanted this race ship style to have a blue and green theme like the concept art, hence I used a light blue overlay layer that corresponds to step 4 of your tutorial.
color layer2 ship1 (4th image): This corresponds to the color and burn layer of step 5 in your tutorial. I used a seperate overlay with some patterns that were supplied with gimp. The bright red lines for engines, guns correspond to the light layers and highlights of steps 6 & 7 in your tutorial. I haven't got the hang of this yet. As you can see, my hightlights lack the color and vividity of your highlights, so I'm also doing something wrong here; I can't quite put my finger on it at this time.
ship1 final (5th image at bottom): This was my final design based upon joining all the overlays. I "played" with many combinations of opacity, using the different addition, multiplication, difference, burn, grain extract, etc... and basically just stumbled upon this brown color variation which I liked best. However, when I compared it to yours final design, I still see that I'm lacking something somewhere. Whether the final ship theme is blue or brown doesn't really matter to me, as long as the art is good.
I'm not happy with my step 3 final greyscale, which is lacking something in relation to yours, if you can give me some idea what I'm either doing wrong, or failing to do here this would be great? Also, my "highlights" step lacks the vividity of your work, I don't know what I'm doing wrong here? Anything else that you think of that I need to do, or do differently, would be of great help for my artistic endeavors.
Thanks a lot for your very useful tutorial. I can see a 100% improvement from my original work to what I have now just based upon learning your tutorial, but I'm still not quite there yet.