Pirate Game Artwork

Preparing the artwork for Undersea Pirate Quest was equal parts excitement-and-fun and relentless-neverending-unimaginably-hard-work. Now that it is all behind me I can reminisce with fondness about the process.

I created all the artwork using open source digital painting software, namely GIMP Painter, and my Wacom Bamboo tablet. Any of the more complex drawings involved the following five stages:

• Sketching – in greyscale with a large round brush to create the main volumes
• Drawing – in greyscale with a thinner ‘knife’ brush to add precision and details over the volumes of the sketch
• Colouring – using limited amount of colours to block the base colours after which adding more colour variation for the light and shadow blocking
• Painting – this is the longest stage involving all the detailing, cleaning, smoothing, and painterly rendering
• Finishing – adding various effects, such as thickness to the painting stroke, lighting and fog