Space Mission promo poster & Calendars

A1 huge and the quality came out perfect.... Those will be given out at the game fair in Essen in October. Whoot!

And because I just got my calendars from Deviantart...

Space Mission Final Trailer

Yay!!!!! So looking forward to get my copy of the game and the posters.

Grass... again

... and I never get tired of it.
I'm still cleaning up my brush presets- throwing out a lot of things I got from other people or found on the net. Probably 95% of those brushes aren't really useful.
Normally I use the one I already >blogged about< and it's still the most useful although it looks so plain. With nature it gets a bit more tricky. Of course it looks awesome to paint every single blade of grass but mostly you'll end up needing ages to do that.
Since I colorate my comic panels 100%ly and the backgrounds NEED a lot of work I redo my preset-list and try to create grass, flowers (those above are self-made as well) and mostly leaves for bushes or trees.

Since some people seem to be eager but have no clue how to do it... (and you SHOULD do it):
This video explains it pretty well

Keep watching it till the video end. The last part is the most important part of the whole process. Defining the brush presets will take a while and you have to test a lot but it's worth the work! :)

And because it's pretty interesting and I just got it: If you happen to have the awesome artbook of "Open Season" check the background paintings again. There's one page showing some custom brushes they actually used and it's interesting to see how those simple brushes work together and how amazing the final result looks.

Chubbanimals Calendar 3

The third calendar is finally done and available and can be purchased >HERE<
It's A4 landscape (A3 on the wall, upper part illustration, lower part the actual calendar.

How the print quality looks like can be seen here: http://trenchmaker.blogspot.com/2009/01/snow-queen.html
It's semi-gloss and very smooth and I like how the colors come out on the Deviantart calendars. Definitely worth the shipping costs since most stores tend to have a problem with violet-blue shades.

Win, win, win for only 1 Like on Facebook!

Whoa... getting competitive!

Schmidt Spiele, myself and hopefully all of you will rock the boat with a tiny like on Facebook.
Normally you have one spot for a game. We made two... :)

Basically the graphics have the same base- animated by my awesome 3D superheros Mehran and Amin- and a concept we finetuned over the last couple of months.
For Version B Bobby Soulo, a wonderful colleague of mine and very talented musician you should keep an eye on, made the music and lend us his voice.

Long talk, short info: The music and voice-over differs a lot and that's where you can decide what you like best. If you don't speak a word of German: no matter, listen, experience and like. It's your choice!

What you can get for participating?
A lot!
<b>The Prices:</b>
- The very first game package we get (game languages are German, French, English, Italian and Dutch i think... English 100%ly!)
- a signed A1 promo poster (i just finished 2 days ago...)
- aaaannnnd.... the original design of one alien (of course I chose one of the cuter ones...) made on paper.
The only chance to get an original piece for free :D

I'll upload the piece when I get a chance to get it scanned properly. But trust me: I'd really like to keep it >____<

An example of the look of the designs can be found here: http://cliquenabend.de/spiele/062100-Space-Mission/bilder.html
Of course the one somebody will get is not displayed but you might get a hint.
 
Where to vote?
http://de-de.facebook.com/SchmidtSpiele

Questions? Shoot! And be so kind to spread the news. We made a bet how many votes we get and I really wanna get the cookies! :yum:

Anne

Christmas -whoot

Short gif animation of the last illustration for my calendar.
Not as fancy as I wanted it to be but I like it anyway and it looks nice in a quite bigger version. Funny (and really annoying) is that the colors are massively changed in the screenshot mode and the final image looks radioactive in the gif version. It's actually something inbetween both color saturations you see.

If anybody knows a solution for the screenshot problem let me know. >_<

1 Poster... in layers

Actually some layers seem to be missing in the screenshot... O_o *scratches head*
Anyways, that's a good way to show that Photoshop isn't always click and done and not everything can be fixed with one layer. Especially when it comes to 50% non-painted art, I found it very useful to carefully layer effects over each other instead of trying to stuff everything in one.
Since I've got the bad habit of NOT naming everything I can strongly advise to NOT follow my example. ;) It's pure madness but in the workflow I totally forget resulting in massive swearing afterwards.

If somebody wonders: I work with both the English (home studio) and German (studio) version. Results in pretty funny files.