The "Art Process" -- Such as it is...

So as kind of a weird paradox, as time on the Game Jam got shorter, my art got better (I think). 

I hacked out that cover image in under ten minutes so I could have something to act as a placeholder. Of course, I never got a chance to update it. The monster looks like something from Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. At least you can tell there's a castle in there. Maybe.

However, I was quite pleased with the 3/4 shots I did for the conversation headers -- Hero and the Castle Keeper. I felt they came out much better and classed the place up a bit. See the attached image for the process I went through in creating the Castle Keeper.

I wanted a character sort of like the Crypt Keeper, one of the narrators from the old Tales From the Crypt comic books. I figured he could introduce the game and explain the controls. He turned out to have other uses as well... I used Krita for almost all the graphics. I roughed out a blueline sketch (A) with a kind of raggedy robe wearing ruffian. I then made a new layer and redid the lines with a small ink brush. At that point, I realized that he needed to be facing right instead of left, so I flipped him for the rest of the work (B).

I made a new layer under the ink, and turned off the blueline. I painted the silhouette of the Keeper solid gray. This would make sure there wouldn't be any holes in his alpha. I then locked the alpha (transparency) and made the colour pass (C). You can see that my brushwork was a bit sloppy -- I wasn't worried about that since the nice strong black ink lines held the borders for me.  After that, I merged the two layers (D) and exported it as a %.png file. 

When I did the 3/4 for Hero, I made sure to go back over the character's outline with a wider black pen to make a "cutting edge" which holds him out better against the background. For the keeper, I was pretty close to the deadline, so that detail slipped through the cracks.