Humble Indie Bundle promo art

The Humble Indie Bundle is a bundle of five indie games. This is some of the promo art that I did for it. I spent some 5-7 hours on each, perhaps. Compositionally weak. I still need a lot of practice drawing scenes and interaction. I used layers a lot for these, because it enabled me to nudge the elements around independently.

A main splash image of some sort was needed to spice up articles about the bundle. I suppose the benefits are two-fold. Sites might be more likely to run/promote the news item if there's a fun "face" to put on the article, and people are more likely to read it.

I made the Braid guy kind of happy and jumpy even though he might not be in the game. My thinking there was that a smiling face would make the image more inviting. There were too many guys just standing there already.

I was only supposed to do the Cortex Command soldier first, but it soon escalated and I did all of the characters. I wanted them to be consistent in proportion and style. However, I kind of failed there later. The soldier's head varies wildly in size.

The characters all have a transparent background, and the reflection is a mid-gray layer set to Hard Light mode. This way the characters can be put on any background.

I hadn't played all of the games, so I had to research the characters quickly, trying to find clues about their mood and body language. In the end I just drew whatever came out though. At first, the Braid guy looked liked a missionary on strong uppers, so I redrew him. I guess he's thinking about about some puzzle now. Samorost guy is doing his shout.

I had a lot of fun here finding roles for the characters. Gish ended up on the bottom of the basket because he's too similar to the World of Goo blobs. I failed drawing the flatten-sphere balloon in perspective first, so I had to make a 3D "box model" in blender and use as reference. The seams were a chore to paint. Butt. The soldier's pose and the negative space between the legs bothers me a lot.

I wanted to draw the more aggressive intercepting ship from Samorost 1 in the background, but it's not in both games, afaik.

Here I wanted to show the characters playing around, a bit like kids who found an exciting structure out in a field.

I made the 3D logo by un-skewing and re-skewing the Kotaku logo, then displacing and skewing copy to get the extrusion effect. The characters were drawn in a separate layer so I could move them around a bit.

A movie reference has hidden itself in the image.

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I also did a piece for Reddit, but I'm not sure if it was ever used or widely seen.

I'm not terribly interested in the business side of things, but apparently we got a lot of traffic (which translated into purchases) from Reddit, so my idea here was to draw the HIB characters getting a ride by the Reddit mascot thing. The pic turned out a bit boring and static though. It should probably have looked more like a hunched dad carrying an excited child on his back.

When doing the shadows I work with a flat blue-gray or purple-gray brush, then I airbrush the edges, then I hue shift the soft edges to yellow, using replace color.