Page 2

Week 15
Rick Raymo speaks on the focus of B2 and other cool stuff

Week 14
Jay brings us up to date on Blood 2's development

Week 13
Schlegel teaches path-finding class

Week 12
Bill V takes us through level creation techniques

Week 11
Jay takes a tour through a Cabal meat factory

Week 10
Dan talks about the soundtrack using IMA

Week 8
Greg talks about possibilities of weapon modifications

Week 7
Ernie shows tricks of motion-capture and texture mapping

Week 6
Ben shows a day in the life of a Fanatic

Week 5
Andy talks about the interface and menus

Week 4
Kev picks the Blood movie actors

Week 3
Schlegel talks about AI

Week 2
Bill shows how to drive

Week 1
Jay gives a tour

Hey ya'll... it's my turn to the update, so here it goes. I'm Eric Kohler, the concept artist for Blood II, and I'm not much of a writer so you'll have to forgive my less than perfect grammar. A lot of people ask me about the style I used to make the chosen action shots, so I thought I would give a quick over view of my digital coloring method and then tack on a few concept art goodies and a new desktop image at the end.

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The action shots are basically pencil drawings with most of the actually coloring done on a layer below the initial image. I'm gonna start getting all photoshop technical now, so if all you want is to see some new art, this is where you skip to the bottom ;). Anyway, take your pencil (or charcoal) drawing and scan it. Bring it into photoshop and copy the background layer so you have two layers that are exactly the same. You should have what looks like the same drawing you started with…just like ol' gabriella here. Make sure you leave room for any background stuff you might want to do.

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Now erase the background layer so it is just white, and set your second layer to "multiply". Click on the background layer again and you can add color behind the pencil drawing . to get a hand painted look, I add a close up photo of some rust I took at one of the shipyards here in seattle. It gives a similar look to a sienna under painting. Anyways, just go to town on your rust picture with the airbrush or paintbrush tool, and you can quickly get some cool and gritty effects. I like to use the airbrush set on "overlay" or "screen" to keep some of the grunge from the rust. Here's what just the backround layer looks like after I've been painting for awhile.

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Doesn't look like much, does it? Well check it out once you put the pencil over it. The pencil sure helps it out, eh? Here I've also thrown in a border and started monkeying around with some adjustment layers to change the background color.

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Now we get to the fun stuff... aka the blood. I went out back of our building and whipped diluted ink at big sheets of paper for awhile to get those nice splatters (and to scare the folks who work next door)…I've found you can get away with just about anything if you tell people, "oh don't worry, I'm an ARTIST." That's another story though…I better wrap this up first. Here's an almost finished product with plenty of gore and a few color changes in the foreground and background.

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And finally we're done (jeez, won't this guy shut up)! To get the last details in I added one more layer over the pencil and painted over some of the bits I didn't like (check out the differences in the face). So there ya' have it. My secret "make it look like you hand painted something when really you cheated and used a computer" coloring method. Hope all you artists out there found it interesting.