A pair of Psi-kids!
The background for this one ended up as a happy accident with the green gradient turning into purple by the bottom of the piece.
Also, I had a phone case with the design printed on it, I think it works quite well for the size and shape of the piece.
Despite the fact that I don’t have a New 3DS, I procured a set of blank cover plates and customised them with my Smash Bros mains!
Part of the fun in composing this piece was determining how to design an image that would be engaging and interesting when split along the middle. I think this design works quite well, each half is interesting in its own right!
Here are some progress pics. I started with a sketch and colour test in Photoshop before transferring the design to the cover plates, which were primed with Daniel Smith’s Watercolour Ground. It’s an interesting surface to work on – I found I had to be very careful when applying layers as reworking any area disturbed the layer beneath.
For some months I’ve been meaning to start work on a massive poster with the entire Smash Bros cast. Of course with new characters being announced regularly for Smash 4, I’ve had a great excuse to not start that work. Besides, the prospect of fitting some 50 characters or so into a single image terrifies me.
Still, I needed an idea for something to scribble today, so I got started on the Smash Bros. What was going to be the massive poster has instead turned into the original 12. Much more reasonable. There’s a bunch of white space though because I thought I’d need to fit four times as many characters in!
If I was to paint this it’d need a lot of refinement first. But it was a fun exercise in seeing who I could draw from memory (Mario, Link, Samus, Pikachu, Fox, Ness) and who I needed to look up reference for (Captain Falcon, Kirby, DK, Yoshi, Luigi, Jiggly). It surprised me because I’ve never drawn Samus before but I have drawn some of the others. I guess part of it was that I started out scratching things in very low detail but decided to be more detailed for later characters.