Background/Inspiration/Reason behind the art (feel free to skip directly to the progress shots, this is basically me on a tangent/musing):
I'm very new when it comes to digital painting (as you can see...) which is why my work is pretty rough. So don't take my process too seriously because there are way better ways to do things than the way I do. It would take other artists way shorter time to do this kind of drawing... Most of my history in drawing comes from doodling in the margins of my notebooks. I did oil painting for awhile... on and off and eventually drawing became a hobby I did when I was bored and had a set of colour pencils near me. So bit nervous because I don't really show digital artwork to an actual audience. But some people saw me streaming when I was drawing and they said others might be interested. This was initially just meant as a private present for my boyfriend because he played protoss and this was supposed to be a romantic card (though I might see if I can get a tshirt of it for him.... hmm...). It was supposed to feature some over-the-top corny/cringey line like "I live for the swarm but my heart is for Aiur" because yeah, wasn't supposed to be for public eyes...so no shame. Our buddy gamegene said it was the perfect representation of our relationship because he views females like a zerg infestation... and how they would eventually infest men so thoroughly they would be a mere shell of their former self, forsaken... and broken. But yeah, he has issues. Anyway, onwards to the....
Progress Shots
Step 1:
I first draw a basic outline of my idea. I try to just get the basic shapes down and ignore all the minute detail. The eggs were added as kinda an afterthought. I actually lost the original image of the outlines I normally draw because I wasn't planning on showing anybody my work let alone the steps I go through for it so this image is a rough reconstruction of what I normally do. I ended up scavenging through the many layers I went through because some nice people said others might be interested in my work and the process I use to paint in photoshop elements. I do my sketches in blue for no particular reason. I made the tentacles a darker blue so it was easier to see where they overlapped on the gateway. Again, at this stage (at least for me), getting the shapes and composition of the image is what I am most interested in. After this stage, I would very rarely edit the sketch so I don't incorporate new ideas I might suddenly get.
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Step 2:
I start making the picture more detailed. This is the final line art I ended up using. I'm missing one of my progress shots because I wasn't able to get a screen cap of it. But basically, I kept drawing in blue on a white background before changing the line colour to a darker grey and the background to grey. I had two versions of zerg tentacles I wanted to use. The one on the left as you can see is more of an octopus inspired one. The one on the right is the carapace zerg tentacle and the one I think is the most common because that is the one I got when I googled "zerg tentacle". You get some pretty weird stuff actually when you google tentacles. I couldn't really decide which tentacle I wanted to use so I ended up using both. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't look as consistent so I tried to make both tentacles be around the same size to balance out the image.
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Step 3:
I started putting in my base colour. I wanted the tentacles to contrast heavily with the gateway. Most digital artists would just use the paint bucket tool but I coloured it in by hand because I am not experienced and my linework is so messy I don't think I could use it... plus, I find it quite fun to colour by hand but it is a pain on the wrist. When I do traditional art, my wrist doesn't hurt as much because I use my whole arm to draw. But because I work with a very small bamboo tablet, I need to use my wrist a lot.
I love the look of infected pustules and leaking pus. It's so delightfully revolting! So I tried to add a ton of those to the tentacles. At first I thought that the carapace tentacle wouldn't have any because it is made of armour... but I thought why not and just figured that the pimples could be lying beneath the skin before the break free of the hard shell and bulge outwards towards the open air. I was also inspired by trypophobia which is something some people claim to have. It's when people are afraid of objects with small holes. Google image search it (Just a heads up, some images are a tad NSFL depending on your tolerance). Pretty neat.
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Step 4:
This is the part I am weakest at. Shading... colouring... major nightmare. Textures (for me) are very difficult to achieve in digital art... when I use my more familiar traditional media, the paper... amount of paint... palette knife... they all contribute to texture. I find it harder to have "happy accidents" with photoshop. Luckily for me, the only texture I ever seem to get is greasy and slimy which is perfect for zerg and protoss anyway.
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Step 5:
Ahhh finally! Some colour! At this point I decided I wasn't going to colour the whole image. In the beginning, I was going to colour in the gateway... and the crystal... but realized I liked how grey it was. The colours of the green eggs stood out a lot better too. I wasn't going to colour in the pustules... but I just love bubbly things so much I had to. I just really want to pop them... It was lucky that purple and green went together anyway so while I think the bright purple distracted from the eggs a bit, it was worth it (for me...) I love how shiny things can be. I didn't think zerg was a shiny race at first. (Isn't that the Protoss' job?) But I always play on low settings and was notified that zerg on ultra was actually a pretty shiny race. I hate the word glisten. But that is what the high quality creep does. On low settings, creep always looked like yummy purple frosting. Pity the deliciousness was just an illusion.
Again, colouring is my weakest point but I really did like the green eggs standing out in contrast to the darker background. In traditional mediums, I could put several colours onto one brush and they would kinda blend themselves into the canvas. I can't do that in digital painting and it takes me a lot longer than it should to colour such a simple image... (I really like how banelings look though there are none in this image).
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Step 6:
This was the original finished image... but after looking back at what the base colours used to look like I felt like it was missing the great contrast between the shining gateway and the dark tentacles so I re-adjusted the lighting a bit more for the final product at the top of this post. I decided I like how the drawing still looks sketchy so I did not clean it up even more.
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The End!
Final thoughts:
I wonder if twin zealots pop out of an infested gateway's eggs... or if zerg could then research warp. I never actually considered the mechanics of it. I quite like painting zerg/protoss stuff... maybe I might do zergified protoss buildings or protossified zerg.