I figured I would post this here as my first post on this forum. I’ve enjoyed the Street Fighter series because of the game itself as well as the art. I have been a particular fan of the Street Fighter 3 series of games. Truthfully, my favorite character design drawings are from the Star Gladiator series (though the game is not a favorite). Anyway, I’m considering creating custom art if I can ever afford an arcade stick to put it on. Anyway, I was inspired by Ikeno’s depictions of characters from Third Strike. I will probably paint on this sketch to finish it off. Most likely I will reference his value structure as well. I’ll probably make Yun light, the middle ground with most of the characters darker (but probably play a bit with contrast on Chun-Li) and then gray out Ryu in the background.
This was fun and challenging because the likenesses for the these characters vary from drawing to drawing in the various games, etc. Hugo was particularly rough since his head size and shape vary greatly from image to image.
Well, here is an update. I went ahead and did a value study to get the general feel the way I wanted it. It struck me during this time that this piece needed ink, so I went ahead and inked it tonight and have not scanned it yet. This a rough sketch, but I like the general light and dark scheme. I think I might reverse the lighting on Yang’s face so that it is somewhat consistent with the others.
Thanks for the comment and the feedback. It matched exactly my thoughts. Here is an updated image, still not finished, but I started by relighting Chun Li from the front (her face), while her body is still lit from behind, which I’ll be fixing. I plan or relighting both Yun and Yang from the front.
Alright, here it is, whew. This took a lot of time to complete. Anyway, I put it on a template for arcade stick art one day. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot from this piece. I tried to make it resemble the art I enjoy and I hope it worked.
Do you just adjust the value study to colorize in Photoshop? I don’t know what the correct wording is, but I recall reading a tutorial from a Capcom artist in Newtype who worked a similar way.
Value study first in gray scale, then making selections and IIRC CMD+U to adjust levels / colorize.
Thanks for the compliments. I appreciate the kind words.
As for the process, it depends on the piece. As far as I understand, lightness and darkness of an image is what our eye perceived first when trying to make sense of an image. I would say maybe 70 percent of my time is spent on the grayscale image.
Then what I do is add the base color, which does sound basically like what you mentioned. The one key is using color to make something look brighter or darker. If I remember, I’ll create a few jpegs to show what I mean.
Thanks for the comment and I agree. I believe 10 characters are missing. I’ll have to get use to montage type pieces with larger groups of characters. Looking back at some of my previous work I have generally only done between 4 to 8 characters in a piece.
I’m hoping to get this on a custom arcade stick at some point.
