This piece was a huge departure for me and a bit of an exploration of my own abilities. A few weeks back I happened to land at zero on a blue sun and the light was blinding. I made a note of it and moved on. I started wondering if there was a way to capture that intensity, that all encompassing blue light. I've tended to stay away from rendering stars in my work mostly because of the intense light, but also because of the new star textures. I was never confident that I could figure out a way to create those in a way that at once looked like the in-game version and also was a piece of art. Tricky business.
I've expressed this concern before. There is a line between creating something that both looks like an in-game asset and, at the same time, doesn't look like a screenshot. The better I get at creating spaceships the more they look like 3D rendered or captured images. The same is also true for other art assets as well. The more closely I adhere to the in-game portrayal the less the image looks like art. And yet, swing too far the other way and it can be an abstraction. I guess this is why I get paid the big bucks.
Anyhoo, to make the star in the above illustration I ended up cheating a little bit. I started playing with painting flat textures in gray-scale and then wrapping those around 3d spheres inside of photoshop. It took some time to figure out scale and a method of randomizing the textures, which I mainly accomplished by using exposure controls to create hot spots, and then laying those over ever-increasingly sized spheres. It probably sounds more complicated than it actually turned out to be, it took me about 2 hours of fiddling before I landed on a big gray blob I liked. After that it was just a matter of multiple color layers and messing around with values. And then I ended up painting a whole bunch on top of all that anyway, because it did have a rather mechanical feel to it. The rest is just brushes, the white "aura" around the star and some space stuff in the background.
The great thing about having an actual store now is that I have a reason to pursue various artistic challenges I didn't have before. My primary goal is to provide the Eve community great art. That is my number one goal with a bullet. But to be perfectly frank, I have no idea what the Eve community considers great art. Fun huh? I know you guys like maps and propaganda pictures of Jita. Those two pieces are the most popular so far. After that it is spread out over all the other pieces. So I have no idea if anyone will like Blue Sun Raven or not. I spent approximately 12 hours creating a piece of art and I don't know if anyone will like it. But I do. So that will have to do. All I can do is keep creating things that I like creating and hope that someone else will enjoy them as well. That is, after all, what all artists do really.
I'm having a blast. And every single time someone orders something from the store, well that is just an incredible feeling. So far, since the store opened, I've sold pieces to people in 15 different countries. How awesome is that?
Onward & Upward.
PS: I do listen to suggestions by the way. :)