Valkia Twitch Channel Artwork

First of all, I just want to apologise for no blog post last week, but I have honestly just been so overloaded with work, usually this would be fine, but I go away next week for 2 weeks so with some tight deadlines for Tether and other clients I've really had to focus all of my attention on my client work!

So instead of writing a big lengthy blog post for this week, I'm going to share a piece that I completed recently, and definitely one of my favourite pieces I've ever done due to the theme and the client. 

You might have seen the Overwatch/Winston fan art that I completed recently (it's the first thing that you see on my homepage!) and that illustration in particular has led to me getting quite a few enquiries from new clients, one of which was Mark Purdy, better known as Valkia on Twitch. Now anyone that knows me knows that I am a MASSIVE fan of Overwatch, not just from a gaming perspective but also a creative one, so I already play the game and was already well aware of who Valkia was, as I'd been watching him on Twitch for many, many months. For those of you who don't know, Valkia is a competitive Overwatch streamer, he streams full time and is particularly incredible with one character in particular; Pharah.

So Mark got in touch with me and asked if I'd be happy to work with him and create some new artwork for his Twitch channel themed around him, Overwatch and Pharah. So here's a few photos from the process!

I always start of really, really rough to begin with, and with the character being the main focal point of the art work, I wanted to ensure the pose/design was right first. Mark let me know that he wanted it to be similar to the Winston piece in regards of the action/movement that the pose gets across. So I drew up a few ideas for poses which were sort of all mid-action in one way or another, but we decided to go with the first one in the end.

First up is always the lines of course! I usually work in Manga Studio 5, and ensure everything is kept to separate layers, it may look a little jumbled right now but it won't in the next image!

Once the lines are done, the flat colours then go underneath those lines, sometimes choosing colours can be one of the hardest parts of creating an illustration, but luckily I had a lot of reference so this part was pretty easy!

Once the flat colours are down, next comes the lighting and shading which helps to really make everything feel more 3D rather than super flat.

That is where my usual process pretty much stops. Once I've got those three stages out of the way, I know that it's time to experiment a little and try and really push the image to not only where it needs to be but that bit further too if I can. So I spent a lot of time trying to portray a lot of different elements in this image such as the bright sunlight, blasting rocket boosters and as always, trying to get across a lot of depth in the image. This part really did take a long, long time but I think it was well worth it in the end.

Big thank you to Mark for asking me to do this and for giving me a reason to play even more Overwatch for research purposes of course! If you want to, you can follow Valkia on Twitch here.

As I mentioned, I am on holiday from the 9th to the 23rd of August, so unless I get chance to prepare some blog posts before I go, there probably won't be any as I don't intend to do any work while I'm away!

Thanks for reading guys!