How much time would you guesstimate it took you from the fourth take/framing, to overall finishing it? It seems like it would take a lot of hours, as someone with 0 artistic background. Even just looking at all the details and shading makes me want to go lie down.
Ah, lucky for you I've been using my time-tracker for the past two work days while doing this: about 4.5 hours of illustration time.
This might include a little time writing the blog post in which I didn't swap tasks in the tracker because I was jumping back and forth at the end, and also includes a short tangent where I polished out a bit of that close-in shot that I liked (and was going to put it in the blog post, but it'd take a couple hours to make it look really good).
Excited to read all the new writing, and excited to run into this art in a spooky ruin and point and the screen while shouting "DAVID!". Thanks for the write-up!
Oh no, shouting! But you're welcome!
(And something about the positioning of the legs on the people carrying the box kept bothering me.)
(I agree. And I didn't want to keep redrawing them, so going with the version where they're cut is even better.)
(Microgravity? Don’t worry about it.)
Magnetic boots.
*conspiratorial thumbs up*
(That said - maybe it's not worth the effort, but what I'd want to see in-game is at least a few variations; we shouldn't have exactly the same tomb-raiding image for every salvage mission. The text of the existing Galatea Academy missions is, honestly, great for this - we've got what's essentially the same mission over and over again, but there's always enough subtle differences to make it stay interesting. Getting that much variety in the artwork is probably not worth the effort? But some variety would be very nice.)
I mean. On the one hand, yeah, it'd be cool. But also, that way madness lies.
Besides the potential for having to do a lot of tedious edits, making artwork that's very very unique to situations - unless carefully deployed! - makes a certain promise about what level of fidelity to expect in content. I feel alright about giving very important missions unique art, but I'm less ok with doing the same for missions that aren't that important.
(Not that I/we are in any way consistent with this; I'm thinking of a certain sword-based lark.)
So, really, I think it's a matter of doing unique stuff for 1. important stuff, and 2. 'when the spirit takes us'. And maybe that #2 is important to keep you on your toes, so you're never quite sure what's
really important...