PUBG Custom Background

I feel like I'm in a really good place with my work at the moment where I can say no to projects if I don't feel like they're going to make me happy, but it's also not often that I need to because the majority of clients who come to me have really cool projects and ideas anyway! This one was definitely up there, it was a perfect match of a clients idea and where I wanted to take my work next.

I'd been wanting to work on more 'action' based illustrations, and I'd also been thinking about doing some PUBG fan art, so when Lee came to me with the idea to create a custom PUBG Twitch offline screen for his friend as a birthday present, there was no way that I was going to say no!

I kind of already had an idea for this in my head, so I sketched it all out on my iPad Pro in Procreate, trying to make sure that I included various characters and tried to capture the main elements of the game itself. 

Everything after the line art I did in Photoshop on my Wacom Cintiq. Once Lee had approved the sketch, I moved onto choosing some colours. I decided to focus on the more wasteland/town type areas of the original PUBG map rather than the grassy fields etc. because I wanted to do a kind of environment that I'd never done before. So as you can see all of the colours are quite natural, earthy tones which is something that I'm not usually good at sticking to! 

I always move onto the shading after I've laid the flat colours down, and I also played around with a couple of different brushes to achieve the look of the grass and the bushes.

After the shading of course comes the lighting! Which is always when an illustration starts to look more 3D rather than flat.

One thing I do with pretty much all of my illustrations is to colour the line art, I think that colouring my lines really helps each element to stand out more and also makes everything look more dynamic. It's also at this stage that I start to add more highlights, especially when I feel like something would be giving off strong light like the exploding buggy for example.

That is where my main process ends and then I just kind of experiment with different effects etc. I also flatten down different parts of the illustration so that I can blur them and make certain elements look like they are further away such as the buildings in the background and the character that is parachuting down.

You can also view a little bit of the process of me creating this illustration in the first vlog that I did for Youtube below too!

Big thank you to Lee for commissioning me to do this! And also a huge thank you to PUBG themselves for featuring this on their Instagram and Twitter too!