TGI Art Test

These are small pieces I did for an art test while applying to a video game studio back in March along with the UI design.

I had to draw a magic potion. What's more established than the health potion? I debated on whether or not to include the label because it blocks the view of most of the liquid in the bottle, so I made an additional potion without a label, and made it a bit more evil looking.

Things I learned on this project: Select > Color range. I was trying to save the file as a .png to have a transparent background, but the problem was that I had a layer with a black background set to 'screen' under the blending mode. So black would disappear if I had a solid background, but would come back if I had no background. I learned the color range technique and played with the fuzziness so it didn't have the awful leftover dark gray bits when I applied a layer mask to the selection. Much faster than erasing it all by hand, and more accurate than the magic wand tool.

Next was to draw a tree. I wasn't interested in drawing a happy lollipop tree because I imagine that's what everyone else will turn in. So I drew a twisted dead tree that reminds me of Sleepy Hollow and Fern Gully.

I felt I might be cheating the test by not drawing a tree with leaves, so I drew another tree with green leaves this time. I'm a fan of Karate Kid, and this is recognizable being inspired by the Bonsai tree from that movie.

The treasure chest.
I'm not very satisfied with the golden glow from the gold coins inside. Perhaps I should've opened the lid more or made it more sparkle-y than glow-y.

Simple. Established. Not much more to say here, let's move on.

Last up for the sprite art test is a battered warrior's shield.  I wanted to show some kind of perspective instead of just a flat simple shield facing forward directly at the viewer, because I just knew that's what most of the other people applying for this job were going to do.