While I was in school, I worked on a small mini game with a classmate on our free time for fun. The game is called Chick-a-Dee and it is a small puzzle game featuring little chickens owned by a little farm girl. The objective to the game is simple – make sure all of the chickens crops the road.

I’m not really here to talk about the gameplay, more so about how the game was made. As usual, I used Construct 2 (www.scirra.com) to create the game. My former classmate is a 3d artist so we decided to play around with 3d sprites in a 2d engine similar to Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo. What he did was model out the chickens and background elements then saved them out as 2d images. I took them from there and implemented them into the build and programmed the game to work.

The game took about 2 days to create and it was never meant to be anything outside of a small game jam style project. But I still went ahead and created an illustration for it. I have included each of the steps I took to create the main title screen.

Over the past year, I have made the dive into becoming a full digital artist. I don’t draw on paper much and instead use the Wacom Cintiq Companion. I made sure to keep my process pretty similar to how I drew traditionally.

I start with quick sketches, blocking out the characters and the environment. At this point, everything is pretty loose and wild. The next step, I ink over the pencils and make the lines nice and clean. From there, I play around with the lighting I might want in the scene by blocking in shadows. This helps me see the mood that I am going for before applying the colors. I then block in base colors and keep everything simple. Just lines and solid colors. Right after that, I grab my shadows from before and place them on top of my colors to really make things pop. I like playing around with the shadow colors. I tend to not use black for my shadowing. For this piece, I used purple hues. Finally, I’ll go over little portions of the piece and add in lighting effects in between the trees, and more.

I may start going over coding one of these days, but still being an artist at heart, I felt like briefly going over the visual creation process instead. Take Care

-Drew