Horror in the Deep
This project was one of my favorites, but also one of my least clean projects. I tried my hand at digital painting for the first time, and having not prior experience, I learned a lot. But I also made many mistakes.
Overall the image is too dark. I wanted to to be dark to create a horror mood, but I ended up making it too dark. Another mistake was the headlights from the submarine: they could have been done in a way that they bled through the letters.
The idea for this poster came from my love of a video game, Barotrauma. The game takes place on one of Jupiter's moons, Europa; under the ice exists a vast ocean teeming with life, life that wants to rip you out of your submarine and eat you alive.
I wanted to recreate the fear and horror that I have experienced in the game, on the poster. I chose to use a massive monster about to consume a small looking submarine.
I started with an image of a whale shark with its mouth open and added some bloody teeth. I used a lot of different brushes to create a rough texture on the monster and to also extend the head of the shark to have the appearance of a non-existent creature. I also painted the eyes in since the original image did not have eyes.
The submarine was created from a base image of a submarine head on. I added the fins, the lights, and the window to make it a little more unique.
The text was created in Autodesk Maya. I made the outline of the text in Illustrator, copied it to Maya, made it 3D, and added a rusty texture to It.