Lady of Paint
My name is Jenner Chen, a Chinese artist from NY. I am currently a freelancer focusing on Splash Illustration and Concept Art. I would love to work at a studio one day and create my own games. This is how I created the Lady of Paint.
The first thing to do is solidify a theme and how that theme plays into the character. In this case, I needed to choose a country.
THEME
I chose China and wanted to blend the traditional aesthetic with futuristic themes to make a mesh between the past and the future. I had 3 mood boards that I took inspiration from to understand the shapes, images, and themes that I liked.
CHARACTER
For the character, I started with silhouettes and worked on my favorite concepts from there. I got a lot of feedback from peers and friends on their favorite silhouettes and tried to balance some aesthetics that I liked from my mood board into these first 6 concepts.
REFINING THE CONCEPTS
I chose 4 of the 6 concepts that I wanted to explore, and put more thought into their designs and how they play into the theme.
FINAL CONCEPTS
I got some more feedback and chose between the first two concepts, and gave them a story.
When I design characters, I like to give them a narrative because it helps me later on in the illustration phase, as well as making the design concise. For my first character, it is a modern assassin that utilizes ancient toxic hexes and gas. The second character is a summoner that fights by splashing CYMK ink on the ink wash paintings on her dress. I eventually chose the last one because I like the idea of bridging modern printing and ancient, traditional art.
THUMBNAILING
For these quick thumbnails, I really wanted to showcase the movement of paint in the composition. It was also important to show how the paint is relevant to this character (summoning), so I ended up picking a summoning pose (4). My personal favorites were 1, 4, and 9, but 1 seemed too static, and 9 needed a different angle.
RENDERING
The painting process for this work happened in two phases that involved problem-solving.
ORIGINALLY (PHASE 1)
Originally, I wanted a dark, bustling city with lots of neon lights and moody lighting. A lot of my reference images were dark, and I really enjoy the pops of color that the streets bring.
I had a lot of funny storefronts made that reminded me of the Chinese cities I’ve been in. I am a person that enjoys zooming in on big works of art, so these were very fun to make as well.
INSPIRATION (PHASE 2)
Halfway through it, dark and colorful (character) on dark and colorful (background) seemed to not work because visually, it was a lot to handle. While browsing how Chinese cinematographers use color in their works, I came across a movie that had the look of ink wash paintings.
Shadow, directed by Zhang Yimou, inspired me to create a background that pays homage to that ancient aesthetic. It also solved how I could make my character pop, and how I was able to put focus on the movement in the painting. It also ties the theme back to the modernization of ancient art into futuristic societies.
REFINEMENT
A lot of the splash art process was refining details, adjusting the atmosphere, including some type of weather, and adjusting which colors to pop and which to mute. I also included some noise and motion blur to help sell the movement of the composition, and how it leads the eye.
FINAL SPLASH AND CONCEPT
Hope this was helpful!
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