Luke Pearson created the designs for Channel 4′s online game, ‘The End’. It’s a free platformer, dealing with concepts of death, our existence and the afterlife, where players must navigate through physics-based puzzles and ponder philosophical questions. Head over to the website to have a go, but be careful— Luke’s stunning visuals and the unique gameplay created by Preloaded may keep you away from work for hours!
“I created nearly all the artwork you see in the game (with the exception of the graphic design and death cards elements). It was a lot of work, but it was the best kind of work and it’s so exciting to see it all brought together and to be able to play it now. Working with the Preloaded crew is one of the best experiences of my career so far, so much work went into making this and they’ve done an amazing job in my opinion.”
“My line-based work is all hand drawn and inked on paper. To ink, I currently use a Pentel brush pen. It’s an extremely convenient tool, as good as most decent brushes with all the convenience of a pen and you don’t really have to look after it too much. You can get a massive variety of line qualities with it and I find it fun to use.
Although sometimes, if you’re like me and hold your pens ridiculously close to the nib, you will end up with ink all over your fingers and there’ve been a few occasions where I’ve unwittingly smeared grubby finger prints on a picture after spending a long time meticulously inking it.”
“I scan my lines, refine and colour them digitally in Photoshop which is the only program I use. I use an A6 Wacom Bamboo for colouring and occasionally redrawing bits of the line work that I messed up in the original.”
“For my flatter, more shape-based stuff, I work solely in Photoshop. I’ll often sketch and compose the image in thumbnail form on paper as I find it a million times easier to see what’s wrong with something and work out the basics in a small drawing on a real piece of paper. I’ll then scan that, knock the opacity way down so I can just see it as a guideline and then work digitally on top of it. I used to use the polygon lasso a lot to create block shapes, but I prefer now to manually draw out shapes with a slightly wobbly-round-the-edges brush I made and carve away at them until they’re what I want.
Even if I’m making straightforward shapes, this lends a hand drawn slightly ‘off’ quality that distracts from its digital nature. I’ll often erase chunks from a block of colour and scribble on top of them with the same brush, until there are only tiny specks of the background showing through, which again distracts from the digital truth and suggests something that’s printed.”
© Luke Pearson, 2011.
