Overwatch Fan Art Process

I initially started this last year, but as we all know, freelancing can be a little crazy sometimes so this year I made it a goal to free up some time to finish it before Halloween. I absolutely love Overwatch, the character designs are super inspiring to me and it’s one of the main things that got me into the game in the first place. So once the new Halloween skins came out I knew I had to do some fan art for them!

I did quite a bit of this in Procreate on my iPad Pro, although I knew I’d have to transfer it into Photoshop eventually, especially when it came to all the effects etc. I started out by roughing in the background and then just sketching circles or ovals where I thought the characters might look good composition wise. This gave me something to play around with and adjust until the composition felt right and I could start to add actual sketches of each character.

I wanted to try and make sure that only one of the characters was the focus, so I ended up placing Reaper in the middle using his death blossom ultimate (mainly because it’s something that has a circular area of effect and would hit each character). I also made sure that each character was aiming and facing towards him so that the viewers eye would be directed towards the focal point.

I managed to get the colours for the characters right quite easily, but it definitely took a while with the background. In these kinds of images I never really want the background to be too neat or high in detail as I don’t want it to distract from the action, and I usually blur it towards the end anyway. However, in this instance I really wanted to at least make sure that the lighting was right with it being lit from both the cool light of the moon and the warm light of the torches. To me, there’s no real secret to learning things like this, and the best way is to just keeping looking at references and working out how to recreate it in your own way.

The same went for each of the character’s effects such as what ability they were using or the effects of their halloween skin. A lot of these effects (especially any gun shots, bullets and beams) were done simply by drawing the required shapes and adding layer effects to each one to get the kind of look that I wanted. I used to want to hand create absolutely everything, but using things like layer effects allows me to still hand draw the initial line or shape and quickly build on top of that, it saves time physically and mentally because I’m not overthinking everything as much.

I would have liked to have done more to this, but I am trying to keep the attitude of ‘finished not perfect’, because now it’s finished, I can move onto the next and keep improving. Time for some Horizon Zero Dawn next?!