The 3 Gods

It wasn’t their intention, but at the moment they met in the vastness of the nothing that was before, the universe was created.

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This world is part of an idea I had when I was creating the illustration for my business card. My first take on the idea was to create only one card with a character illustration, a little dragon wearing a samurai outfit and holding a brush. I did this character and then I started to gather some references for the layout. I found some designers that made their cards with different options, different ideas and colors, and I thought this could be a good dynamic. I decided to create two more characters as they were part of a card game, and with the background of a story starting to pop in my mind I made a mutant monkey and a three heads hidra.

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‘They live in their own world, each one with a particular skill. When they find each other, something unexplainable happens, and somehow, something changes in our world.’

This was a way to keep the different cards connected to each other and to my work, and it remained this way until I decided to update my website.

I wanted to create a layout that was part of my portfolio, and I decided to expand this idea of the cards. I could create a world with more characters, and its story would be spread throughout the layout. I found this company to work in the website with me, Pixelwolf, and they told me this could be doable.

To make the story short, when three of these creatures that meant to find each other finally met, somebody’s destiny is changed here in our world. For example, the three characters from my cards, the dragon, the monkey and the hidra. The dragon has a brush, but he’s not sure how to use it. The only thing the monkey does is meditate, concentrate and think about things. Which head of the hidra is finding information from a different sources, but they only keep it in their heads. When they found each other was the moment I realized I wanted to be an illustrator. Their skills mixed can be used in a way I can draw and paint here in our world.

That dynamics applies to every creature in that world and every person in our world. And that was what I wanted to show in my website. I made a few sketches trying to think how it would work in the layout and I showed Thiago Bisewski, the guy from Pixelwolf who helped me to create all of this. Exchanging emails with him, I had this idea for the illustration on the top, where the gods that started world are ‘looking’ to their creation from above, the ‘Three Entities’.

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‘They were wondering through space, through darkness, through nothing! They didn’t know if they were moving or if they were still, and each one of them was already resigned with loneliness. (…) When they got close to each other the unexplainable happened, and the nothing turned into something, and this something started to form the whole universe we know today…’

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This is how the idea formed, now I want to show how the illustration of the three gods was made. The concept was already created, the background story, but I still had no idea of how the entities would look like. I had already stablished that they were floating in the space, in the vacuum. The universe is already created and they are together to keep everything in harmony. So I thought they could be meditating, it’s a nice pose for a character who has a lot of energy and spiritual-like background. So I started to sketch, one entity at a time. The first entity would have two faces, and both of them should be calm and peaceful. I only got this feeling in the third sketch:

The second entity was easier, I already liked the first sketch I made:

The first two have human body structure, and I thought the third one could be something different, like an animal or a creature. The first sketches wasn’t showing the god feeling the character should have, and in the last one, the dragon, I felt he could be the last Entity. Shenlong from Dragon Ball came to my mind and a huge imposing body would be perfect for the concept and also to compose the layout.

With the designs for the characters created I made the composition, using the dragon body to keep them all together and making the focus in the center of the illustration:

Now it’s painting time.

I made two options in color sketches, a bright background and a dark background. I had previously decided that they were in space, but the layout of the site would decided which one to use. Talking to Thiago we decided that the dark background would be better.

From the color sketch I start to render the image. I mostly use the brush tool in photoshop, and a few other techniques, but the main point of this post is to show how the idea is created and how to pass it to the image.

This illustration is a result of a lot of things that happened since I started to create my business card two years ago. The whole site is a product of that. This is definitely not how a normal process usually is. But I think it’s good to spend some time before any painting. A time to think, to build the idea. To gather references. To sketch. I think it’s a very good way to create something that has a nice appealing, a nice story.

I’ll show something more specific about painting in the future, today was just a little bit of story time. I hope you all liked it 🙂

Final result: