Blender

Creative director Davide Bianca explains how to create eye-catching key art.Key art is what should sell the concept, so you should make something that grabs people's attention, has the right colour palette and poses, and essentially tells a story in a single glance. This key art illustration (above) was created for our motion comic Slavers.It portrays the epic arrival of the Slavers, and the dawn of a new era of humanity. We wanted to convey a sense of vast scale and powerful destruction in the image. The composition had to be developed around the triad of the Slavers, which would be the main focal point, but in order to empower the characters we also needed to showcase the environment in which they were placed.Given the characters' poses we opted for a classic compositional appr...

The second of a two-part series on creating type effects in Adobe's tools looks at Illustrator and Photoshop.In part one of this two-part series of articles, I walked through how to create type effects in InDesign. One might justifiably think that everything you want to do with vectors can now be done in InDesign CC, so why use Illustrator CC?There are many tools and capabilities that Illustrator has that make it very worthwhile. Its toolset is quite different and geared towards different work. While it can be used as such, it is not a page layout tool.Export optionsThere are many ways to bring items over from InDesign to Illustrator, various exports such as EPS and PDF. But unless the clipboard won't support what you have created (which can happened sometimes), the eas...

Digital artist Josh Flores explains how to create an accurate rendition of a Confederate Wraith motorcycle by mixing organic and hard surface modelling techniques.Vehicle modelling can be a difficult task, but in this tutorial, I'll take you through the steps you need to build your very own Confederate Wraith B91 bike. During the course of the tutorial, you'll discover that there are different ways to build organic and hard surface models.I'll also cover the importance of clean-up – so that the model can be used in production – as well as show you three paint methods I use to decal and colour the bike.Typically I build a model by slowly detailing it piece by piece. The most important thing to think about when you start to model is blocking in the correct shape. Proportions and silhouetting...