Photoshop & Blender
Adrien Cantone guides us through his process designing the keyframe art for upcoming sci-fi strategy game Trailblazers
Generally, I’ll get commissioned for a keyframe when a game is reaching the end of production and there are already plenty of visual resources to rely on. In this case, it’s the other way around. The studio Strangers, for which I currently work as a lead artist, needed a keyframe in the pre-production of Trailblazers, a top-down sci-fi RPG in which you manage crews on gigantic landships.
In this instance, you have more responsibilities than when creating an artwork for a game at the end of production, as the keyframe will be presented to potential commercial partners. But you have the advantage of working with a more malleable project, which implies a greater creative freedom. In both cases, the purpose of the keyframe remains the same: to generate interest and convey the various themes of a complex project in a single image, all without straying too far from what the final product will offer.
In this workshop, I’ll explain all the tools that can be used to produce this type of artwork within a short timeframe. All you need to follow this workshop is a basic knowledge of drawing, of digital drawing software such as Photoshop or an equivalent, and the basics of 3D – but nothing complex – as I’ll also explain how I mix 2D and 3D to speed up the final rendering.
1 Study the project
The first task you need to do is carefully study the client’s expectations for the project you’re working on. Notion is a great tool to have all the team’s notes and documentation gathered and organised in one place. If the studio already has artworks by other artists, ask them to point out the positive and negative elements, and refer back to those to push the project forward.
2 Search for references
Trailblazers is set in a post-apocalyptic solarpunk universe, both dangerous and wonderful. When it comes to references, I use PureRef to gather and organise them. Those include many artists such as Moebius and Hayao Miyazaki. However, relying solely on artworks imbued with the style of other artists can actually limit creativity, which is why my mood board is mainly composed of photos of natural and man-made objects.
3 Decide what to include in your keyframe
The challenge of a keyframe is to capture the gameplay of an entire game in a single piece of art. Between FTL: Faster Than Light and RimWorld, Trailblazers is about managing crews aboard gigantic landships across fantastical landscapes. As it’s impossible to depict all aspects and specifi
