Apex Legends Fan Art - What I Think About When Creating Fan Art

I think that one of the main reasons I love doing fan art is because I get to take every little bit that I love or notice about a game and put it into one image, which means the game is shown from my perspective, which usually matches up with a few other players view of the game who can also relate to it. When I get really into a game I get so immersed in the visuals and atmosphere of the game and I can’t help but be inspired, so when Apex Legends was released with it’s unique characters and fast paced gameplay, I was immediately coming up with ideas for it. 

I do fan art just for fun but sometimes I get super lucky like I did with this one where the Apex Legends Twitter account with over a million followers retweeted this illustration. I wasn’t at all expecting it but I’m definitely grateful for all the kind words and love for the image I received from the fans!

I’m going to provide some work in progress images of the piece below along with some tips for creating fan art yourselves.

When you're starting out with your sketch try to think about what elements you'd like to include eg: different character skins, the environment/location, weapons, fight moves, key objects and important elements etc.

If you're going to do an action style scene with more than one or two characters it's important to adjust your sketch as needed so that it doesn't become too cluttered, you should easily be able to see what each character is doing but it also needs to work well as a whole. Having all of the action pointing towards one focal point helps draw the viewers eye around the image.

When choosing colours there's two main ways you can do it, either use the true colours from your original idea, or try to plan your illustration so that you have some kind of colour scheme. So for example when I created this illustration I thought the swamp would be a really cool location to use because of the greens and browns, then when choosing the skins I decided to only go with skins that were mainly grey or black in colour. Luckily the ones that did have hints of colour only used red so it added splashes of colour that matched up with the death boxes.

One really awesome way to make your fan art stand out is to make the most of the character's abilities and also what makes the game itself so appealing. So I made sure to include plenty of visual effects that showed off the character's special moves. The fact that the characters are all either running or mid fight further enhances the concept of Apex Legends which is a fast paced battle royal game.

Thanks for reading and thanks to Apex Legends for retweeting me, there's also a couple of live streams of me working on this piece on my Twitch (aldersaur) if you fancy checking them out!