Daily Archives: 01/16/2013

Custom UNSC Broadsword made of Mega Bloks!

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My friend “Goodwill Hunter” (whom I’ve previously interviewed on the blog), has posted a brilliant custom UNSC Broadsword over on SpartanBloks. I highly recommend checking out the thread for more pic of this great custom.

Now hopefully Mega Bloks will take notice and make the Broadsword a reality as a building set. (Hmm, maybe news at this year’s New York Toy Fair???)

-Sal

Color me this #3 Brute Warrior Concept!

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This one might take a little more time, but wow I see some great possibilities coming from this drawing.

Here is a Brute Warrior Concept:

There’s a good bit of detail in here even without shading. Have at it folks and remember you can submit your colorized versions to [email protected] and I’ll get them posted in this article asap.

UPDATE Here’s what I came up with. This took me a little longer than previous drawings. I put about 30 minutes into this one.

2nd UPDATE I though it would be neat to show how I came up with this. Below I show you the steps I took to make the above colorization.

Starting with the top left going right: Original scanned sketch; Base colors added; the sketch “multiplied” in Photoshop over top of it. While adding color, I actually have the sketch visible and “paint” the colors on a layer below it.

Second row left to right: Shadows; shown with base color; shown with sketch. Again, the sketch is always present so I know where to color in shadows as needed. This just shows you the layer of the shadows more clearly.

Bottom Row left to right: Highlights (they were too light to show by themselves so I showed them on the base colors; with the sketch added; and the FINAL with Base colors, shadows and highlights all together.

The “highlight” layer has the layer effect of “lighten at 25% fill,” while the shadow layer has the layer effect of “multiply at 50% fill.” If I didn’t add those layer effects the shadows would be too dark and the highlights too light. By altering there “fill” transparency, I can effectively show just the amount of shadow and highlight I want without having to change colors. And it also helps to blend the base colors with the shadows and highlights.

As you can see, you can actually be a bit rough in your colorization when using Photoshop. Using layers and layer effects can go a long way with cleaning up the roughness of colorization.

-Sal