I should start by saying that commissions are closed. However, times are tough and
asked very nicely if I could supply some album art for his Soundcloud project, ZeroGrav. Darn sweet of him to use a human artist instead of AI.Since I always love seeing other people’s art process, I thought I’d post mine for you all here.
You can hate me for the first thing I did, if you want: Once the music had inspired an image in my head, I looked at some AI-generated images of cyberpunk cities. They were not super helpful, since the AI couldn’t grasp the concept of looking out at a city through a window — it kept showing me random windows standing in the middle of streets. Nevertheless, this helped me get a nice cityscape sketched out.
Like AI, stock photography was also a bit unhelpful, and I couldn’t find a good anatomy reference for a woman taking off a gas mask. Luckily, I remembered something of the sort happening in this old music video, so I looked at that instead.
Now I could make a quick sketch in Corel Painter:
I put the wrong name on it, like a goober. Other than that, it was approved!
Now to get down to business. Paintings, unfortunately, require you to start with the boring background before you can get to the good stuff. I used a watercolor tool for the clouds, the dull conte tool to chalk out the city, and the 2B pencil tool for the hard lines. Then I went into the focus settings and fooled around in glass distortion.
Now for the good stuff, I thought as I began drawing the foreground, completely forgetting that I still needed to paint raindrops on the glass. I avoided using pure white, instead sampling from the background colors. Then I was able to start making person-shaped blobs in various hues.
After shading out the contours with dull conte, I used the Just Add Water blender to smooth it all out. The hand and gas mask were drawn last because they’re foremost in the image.
For this portion, I added more highlights and fine lines to the death hawk and gas mask. I also started blending a little bit of hot pink into the subject to maybe give it some pizzaz. The end result probably still lacks pizzaz!
Before adding the text, I used a giant airbrush tool to make more pink highlights as well as black shadows. I then made those highlights and shadows transparent, erasing the areas that transgressed over the windows. All that’s left now is to wait for Ian to approve the final image.