Color signature

No, holidays are not boring

During my last vacation, I spent some time in NYC with my girlfriend, before sailing south for some great cruise in the eastern Caribbean. I took the opportunity to take some shots of Manhattan with my Galaxy Note from the Empire State Building observatory, knowing this would be useful for creating cities concepts for my game.

BTW if you've never been there, you should. The view is spectacular, and the city is awesome.

Then during the trip I used my Note to do some over paints, some of which I'd like to share with your now. These are coming straight from Sketchbook mobile on the Note.

The main goal here was to try to find some color signature for the game. I searched for a specific color range for each of the three main components of my game:

1. The earth environment. Reflection of the desperation of the human race, crushed by the superior alien technology.
2. The Aliens. The color palette, the shapes and silhouette all have to reflect the use of non earth technologies.
3. The hero's biplane is a reflection of hope, and must be very different from the rest of the human items.

This one is my favorite. The aliens are aggressive and colorful, almost arrogant. They don't need to hide. They are a mixture of crustaceans and wasps, with their yellow stripes and dots and spiky silhouette. The background uses dimmed shades of orange, ocher and green. I think it reflects well the state of despair of the humans. The biplane is classic red and offers a good representation for hope.

The next one I find less interesting. I was trying to push further the background into ocher to give it a more distinctive look, but I think this is too much as it washes out any other color variation. I also tried to detail and cleanup the alien ship too much, and as such it doesn't leave enough space to imagination. The result is a little naive given the limited control one can have with the mobile tools, compared to say Photoshop.

This one I find also interesting. The background colors explore another palette, with more purples and oranges.  I quite like it. The ship is quite interesting in its shape and has some velvet like quality to the surface. It has a good balance between organic and technology. I will try to push this further in upcoming researches.  It's also a good candidate for experimenting with non traditional shaders for the ship's surface.

That's all for now. Your comments are always welcome.