Work Text:
Art Notes. Let's talk shop. I knew instantly that I wanted to do something for Darkwood and especially something with horror elements, but what? I had several techniques/elements I wanted to incorporate. 1) a dynamic scene, 2) at least two total panels, 3) atmospheric horror like you get in the game, 4) scary dogs, 5) my favorite early weapon in the game (board with nails). I considered something with Wolfman too, but honestly I'd probably make him too sexy by accident. The Stranger is not the focus, but he is the POV character. I didn't want to do a top-down drawing, even though Darkwood is a top down game... but what makes it so scary is (for me) the slow reveal of information. One thing I hoped to achieve with this is that same reveal: it's a tall image that should, if I've done my job right, get scarier as you scroll. First the forest, then the eyes, then the dogs all the way at the bottom. That's not going to work if the viewer scrolls all at once, but I'm hoping it works for at least one person. I think technically that would be better achieved by a longer comic with more panels and the dog reveal on a whole separate page, but so it goes. I chose dogs as the focus because 1) they're fun to draw, and 2) you encounter dogs so, so often in the early game, and those encounters, especially with the huge dog in the corn maze, are burned into my mind. I am--I have to be honest here--horrible at the combat in Darkwood. Genuinely, I get so scared that I can't kite the enemies at all and dodging might as well be magic to me. And it's not like I've barely played the game! I've put in quite a few hours. So I've died to just regular dog packs in the woods more times than I can count.
Mechanically, I decided early that I wanted the dogs fully inked and manually colored. They're mirrored to perhaps make it more unsettling, and also, if I can confess something, to reduce the workload a little. By the time I made that decision I had gone through about five different sketches, scrapped a different style of inking entirely, and restarted the coloring multiple times. I am more comfortable working with soft brushes/shading/pencil tools, and here I knew, I KNEW, that I wanted to use a hard angled brush for all the ink and colors. And finally the linework started to look less like shit and more like actual art, and then the coloring came together, and I was like okay. This is something I can work with. Then I got to do the fun stuff like the blood, drool, glowing eyes, and highlights. I'm pleased as punch with how the drool turned out. The eyes/hand panel is nothing technically special but I am quite happy with it.
The background gave me trouble again: initially I did linework with the same chisel brush as everything else, but it really wasn't scary enough. I had to look at more game footage/art before I decided that actually, hard lines were the problem and distortion/blurring/fog would be cooler. Plus I was thinking about the lighting and sunset: the trees needed to be backlit, but light like that also shines through at the edges and softens things up. So I smudged everything and messed with the layer properties quite a bit. The clashing styles (linework vs no linework) works for me as contrast, but I worry a little that the background and foreground elements now look too disparate. And finally, I got to mess around with overlays and texture effects plus the greenish mist on the top layer. I had a ton of fun making this. Thanks for the opportunity to create for Darkwood and talk about art!