Artbook: The Story of our Splash Art
“Artbook” is a series of articles by Legendary Play’s art team, led by Karo, to showcase the making of the esports world in Esports Heroes, the latest mobile title by Legendary Play
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Do you remember the feeling of seeing artwork from your favorite games? The excitement you felt when a new season starts and new promo art is revealed? If you are curious about how much effort it takes to create the art for a game, we’re going to break it down for you in this article based on our newest illustration. You will get a sneak peek into our techniques, workflow, and thoughts behind our art. We will be providing art updates periodically to let everyone get an insight into the fantastic world of ESH art!
Understanding the need
Our story, like many other stories before, started with a need. We needed show-stopping artwork to use as a header image on the Esports Heroes website. Our goal was to create art that would not only say something about our game genre but also would be as authentic to esports as possible.
Getting the right idea
Imagine a huge stadium filled for the worlds semi-finals. You feel the vibrations of the crowd and see the lights dancing around. Everyone is looking to the center as the biggest esports players in the world are competing on the stage. The final round draws to a close and your favorite team’s player just hits the shot of a lifetime, sending the entire stadium into an eruption of cheers. It is an epic victory. As Team Legends move towards grabbing the trophy, the whole stadium shakes as the crowd chants “TL, TL, TL”. Confetti falls and everyone celebrates. We wanted to capture this exact moment and feeling in our Splash Art.
Sketching the thumbnails
We started the initial work with three thumbnail sketches. These were raw, rough, undefined, and in grayscale. We were looking for a serious, epic, hero-like atmosphere. After reviewing all three, we decided to proceed with the first one. Composition in the other options seemed a bit too chaotic and the mood didn’t convey what we wanted strongly enough either. We took our selection and modified the perspective to create an even more dynamic composition. We believe this creates more exciting artwork. Our Art team worked hard to ensure the anatomy, values, and design were on the highest level.
Adding Life
Our next step involved bringing our grayscale artwork to life by adding color. Initially, we created a few different color sketches. We considered using our primary green but felt it could overpower the viewer with our website’s current color scheme. As a result, we set on orange instead. We combined brighter vivid colors that are perceived as more casual with more muted tones viewed as more serious. We felt like this approach would be beneficial, as it is taking best from both of the worlds and makes characters pop.
Rendering Process
Following the color decision came the rendering. We assured our art forms are correct and adjusted our values once again. We have a specific artstyle and that style has rules we have to follow. We limit the amount of colors, we use only hard brushes, and airbrushing is not permitted. Rendering lights is the only exception to the rule.
Final Touches
After we have a rendered splash art, we get to add our final touches.
These include our TL logo, logos of our partners, and other personalization to the background and athlete’s jerseys. Our Art team also added dotted texture and chromatic aberration to finish the look. After this step, our artwork is ready to be shown to the world.
Conclusion
Our journey to creating just this one piece of art requires a lot of work within a team of artists. As we continue to develop our game, we will keep showing you artwork that we make and the thinking that goes behind it.
