My name is Gabin Guédé and I am a 22 year old French artist.

I’ve always loved playing video games and drawing, but being a lonely kid I lost interest in creating video games when I learned that it was essentially teamwork. That’s why I went to a comic school after high school, thinking that I would prefer a job that would let me do everything myself.

Here, I learned a lot about art and I became interested in the video game industry again, being no longer afraid of teamwork. During my last year in school I watched hundreds of hours of tutorials on Youtube and my digital painting level drastically increased during the year.

I graduated as a cartoonist in 2018 and recently found my first job for an indie game studio. I’m really excited about it. I hope it's the beginning of a career!

Here is a step by step of the final illustration, Bone Tie, I created for Art War 3. I will explain my thoughts during the process,

The painting was entirely done in Photoshop.

Composition

I started looking for the composition before anything else. The first sketches often look like a bunch of chaotic lines, from which I try to find interesting silhouettes. I did not really think about perspective and anatomy at this stage, my main focus was to set all the elements I wanted in the frame of the picture.

Adding Value

The next step was to add values on a layer under the sketch. As you can see I also changed my mind on the background and decided it would be some kind of basement.

I think setting the values is a crucial step when creating an illustration. Balancing lights and shadows allow us to guide the viewer’s eye by helping it focus on what is important in the picture without dwelling on unimportant details.

Here I started cleaning the sketch by painting over it, also introducing stronger lights and shadows to the piece.

I think I made a mistake keeping the picture in grayscale that far in the process. I would usually have added colors earlier to the painting, but I was feeling a bit insecure about my drawing and stayed in the black and white safe zone for longer.

Color

I finally decided to bring colors to the image, but being so advanced in the black and white I had to do it using layers in color mode. I don’t like going from grayscale to color that way. It feels like a cheap way to bring colors and they often look out of place.

Some gradients set on multiply or light mode helped unifying the colors added before.

Here was the painting several hours later, after spending a lot of time detailing it while trying to save the (weak) color mood I created before. Some saturated areas like the red beam finally helped me to bring strong colors to the piece.

Post Processing 

For this final step, I used post-processing techniques to add various effects to the painting.

I made some color level adjustments, added gaussian blur in the background, some dust particles in the light and finished by adding some noise.

I also used what Sinix calls “high pass overlay”. Most of what I know about post processing comes from his  “7 Tips for Post-Processing your Art” video, go check it if you are interested.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I did not strictly follow my usual process for this work. I usually go from chaos to control when painting, starting by following my instinct and feelings, then working over it while keeping in mind common rules of perspective, anatomy and lightning. I think I was a little stressed by my first participation in Art War, that's why I did not dare to use such a random process. But we all learn and improve from making mistakes and understanding them.

I hope that breaking down my illustration may have helped some of you or given them ideas.

Keep drawing everyone. I am looking forward to the next Art War!

You can follow Gabin on his Instagram page.