Making of 'Breakfast Wars'

Introduction

In this tutorial I will be showing the process behind the creation of Breakfast Wars, as well as some general techniques I use to create my artwork. Starting with how I approach sketching my initial designs, I will detail the steps I take that lead to the final rendering. I hope you can apply this method to a variety of your art projects and achieve consistently good results. Having been influenced by concept artists like Harald Belker and Scott Robertson when I first got into this stuff, I'm sure you will see echoes of this in my process and work.

I usually start off with a pencil and paper to work out my idea before heading into Photoshop. For this illustration I looked at a lot of different photos of kitchen appliances while trying to decide how the robots in a kitchen could look. It helped to draw some juicers and toasters from reference to warm up and to better understand my subject matter before I jumped into designing the bots. One of the design problems I faced was how to make plain kitchen appliances look like menacing, lively robots. After looking at some picture of animals I decided that a frog and a crab stance would work well for the toaster and the juicer respectively. Whenever I design I always focus on the subject having a great silhouette or outline so the frog and crab design elements just complement that (Fig.01).

Fig. 01_sketches

Fig. 01_sketches

Before I added any light or dark tones to the image I set the sketch layer to Multiply and lowered the Opacity. I then created flat base colors on a layer to block out the different parts of the subject and placed this layer under the sketch layer. In this way it also worked as a selection mask for when I began to add value to the image. This is how I start almost all of my illustrations (Fig.02).

Fig. 02_block_sketches

Fig. 02_block_sketches

Next, I picked where my light source was going to come from and I created a layer where I began shading. I am aware that this step seems like a big jump from the last one. All I did in this step was simply mask out one part at a time and shade the robots while working only with a soft black brush. If I am shading a complicated part I will create a new layer to work on the tricky part and merge it down to the main shadow layer when I'm happy with it. If you use this method then it's important to remember that shadow consistency is the key to realism. Don't be afraid to be generous with your shadows; it's okay to start dark as you move onto the light layer. Consider your lighting too: is it soft light or a direct hard light so that it creates sharp cast shadows? Where is the most of the light coming from? In the case of Breakfast Wars I chose to backlit the scene (Fig.03).

Fig. 03_shadows

Fig. 03_shadows

Much like the previous step, here in the light/reflection layer I slowly built up definition by masking out the parts one by one while working only in white this time. As with the shadow layer it helped to work in multiple layers for more control before merging it all into the light layer. I decided that the bots would hate highly reflective chrome and glossy surfaces so it was helpful to think of the robots as reflecting the light in their surroundings and not as matte forms reflecting the light of a singular light source. I also had to take into consideration the fact that the light would also reflect off the brightly lit counter top and onto the bots. I used a Hard brush for the most part at this stage and not a Soft brush because the nature of glossy materials calls for hard edged reflections (Fig.04).

Fig. 04_light_shadows

Fig. 04_light_shadows

I started to focus on the toaster next. Seeing that the toaster didn't have enough going on to appear like a convincing metal object I used a little trick to add distorted reflections that are characteristic of chrome surfaces (Fig.05).

Fig. 05_toaster_creature

Fig. 05_toaster_creature

To make this effect I set my brush to 100% opacity and brushed some soft light and dark gray tones on a layer over the toaster. I then selected the Magic Wand tool, set it at a tolerance of 2 or 3 and began clicking and deleting the parts that the magic wand had selected for me. As you can see the selections wrapped around nicely and I was left with an effect that worked well (Fig.06).

Fig. 06_wand_tool_effect

Fig. 06_wand_tool_effect

After finishing with the last step I realized that the side of toaster was still too dark so I worked a stronger reflection into the toaster. For the hot toaster coils I drew out the shapes using the Pen tool, added orange stroke to it and applied an Outer Glow layer effect (Fig.07).

Fig. 07_toaster_light_effects

Fig. 07_toaster_light_effects

In this step I fully fleshed out the bread slices. At first I was just going to cut out the slice of toast from a photo but it didn't look good so I ended up sampling colors from the bread photo using the Eyedropper tool instead and coloring the bread that way. I added some steam/smoke coming out of the toaster for some dynamism; any kind of movement is good in a composition like this. I also added some yellow lighting around the toaster because it was starting to look too monochromatic (Fig.08).

Fig. 08_toaster_smoke

Fig. 08_toaster_smoke



I moved back to the juicer and added some yellow rim-lighting, as I'd done with the toaster. For the oranges, I sampled colors from a photo reference and lit them to my liking, much like I did with the slices of toast (Fig.09).

Fig. 09_juicer_idea

Fig. 09_juicer_idea

For the cascade of orange juice I started by painting out the stream in a solid orange color. I then proceeded to add the highlights on the gush of juice by hand, but they weren't giving me the results I wanted so I tried a quick shortcut. I opened layer styles for the OJ layer and I applied a bevel and emboss effect with the texture option box ticked. I liked the look so I kept it to develop further (Fig.10).

Fig. 10_juice_texture

Fig. 10_juice_texture

Fig.10

I separated the bevel and emboss highlights into a layer and offset the layer upwards so it would more accurately depict where the light was coming from. I also softened the highlights a little and adjusted the color and size of the stream (Fig.11).

Fig. 11_juice

Fig. 11_juice

At this point I was almost finished with the illustration and it was time to incorporate a background. I decided that I would use a real photo of a kitchen to serve as a backdrop for the warring bots as that would add to the realism of the bots themselves. However I immediately saw that it wouldn't work as the photo was too overpowering in its details (Fig.12).

Fig. 12_composition

Fig. 12_composition

I tried a heavy lens blur on the image and it looked good so I added a marble texture to the lower part of the picture and blurred its edge. Now I had a nice counter-top. To further integrate the counter-top into the image I brushed some white streaks on a layer over the marble texture and ran a small hard edge eraser through it. I added dark scratches to the war-torn counter to add to the feel (Fig.13).

Fig. 13_blur_effect

Fig. 13_blur_effect

I added the final touches like the shadows cast by the bots and a slight reflection. I moved the toaster's shadow lower on its right side to give the illusion that his right feet are off the ground and he is about to do a dodge move. I put in some minor details such as the markings on the side of the toaster and I finished off the image by adding a Levels adjustment layer to enhance the contrast.

And I was done (Fig.14)!

Fig: 14

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