'They Worshipped the Water' - Splash Art - IMBER
The magnificent parallax animation was done by Nika Lemust (https://twitter.com/Ryuutsu).
I created this splash art for IMBER(https://runefish.itch.io/imber?secret=WqFRmDfsmIWZO52ZXoiEbDEF3U) (THE ROOKIES submission: https://www.therookies.co/entries/25683), a 3D puzzle game made by friends at uni. It features the main character Obsidian marveling at the magical water temple vista. The game's story takes place on a desert world where a nation worships its lonely sea.
This illustration took a while as I had to remake it from the ground up halfway through the process but it was worth it in the end. I am thrilled with the new direction. It was done mostly in Photoshop and I used a little 3D for the final perspective. It took me around 15 hours to complete.
Parallax animation made by Nika Lemut.
The canvas was extended to allow for animation.
The bigger version is extended for animation purposes.
The process
Coloured Thumbnails. The game's colour palette mainly featured blue and white. Due to this we chose the same colours for the splash as well. As such the upper right one got eliminated first.
Thumbnails. The team wanted an extreme perspective but not too much movement. The splash art was to be environment focused. I still experimented outside of those boundaries but ultimately, staying within them was best.
Thumbnails
With film gate present at 4K
Ended up helping myself with a quick 3D block-out since the angle was quite extreme and there were many objects present. I still changed a bunch of things for the sake of appeal.