I wanted to paint something that dealt with videogames but in an unexpected way. When I look through game magazines, there are some common things I find in how companies advertise their games. Usually there's this main character, often male in gender, that takes up the majority of the visuals. A weapon tends to be in hand, and the visage is one filled with negative emotion, be it anger, contempt, fear. If the character happens to be a woman, they're usually half-naked or moreso, posed in a suggestive fashion while brandishing a handgun or a blade. I understand these are ads designed to interest the audience into the sort of theme or gameplay inherent to the product, but they tend to paint a character as monotonous--especially when every advertiser goes for the same idea.

Samus Aran is from the Metroid series of videogames, and she appeals to me over other female characters in gaming because she hides her femininity with the suit that she dons while pursuing a bounty. If she had never removed her helmet, no one would have ever questioned that she was in fact a male character. Cat's out of the bag though, and I think Samus is one of the stronger role models in gaming for females as she's more than competent than most men with an exosuit and a multi-purpose arm cannon. Given all that, I wanted to give Samus a day off, so to speak, and provided her a moment of peaceful solitude with a Grand Canyon sunrise.

I rendered this entirely in Painter 8, first laying down an initial sketch with the 2b pencil of Samus's general shape and the fore, middle, and backgrounds concerning the canyon. Then I applied an underpainting with all the major colors I'd use, using the smeary round variant of the oil brushes. Once I had my initial palette on the canvas, I built up values using the round camelhair brush, referencing a photograph for the canyon and sunrise while eyeing what little visual information I could find on Samus. I blended the sky using the Just Add Water variant of the blender tools and used the burn tool from the Photo section to tweak the sense of depth from the foreground objects to the back (going for atmospheric perspective). For additional finishing touches, I added extreme highlights to Aran's hair and armour, applying a coat of white airbrush over the brightest parts to give the proper effect.

What I didn't like about the outcome is this piece is how desaturated the colors are. This is not by intention, but an effect of my work process. I've been working as a black and white sketch artist for some time, and only in recent years have I truly embraced color in my finished work. Whatever the reason though, I tend to choose hues that lack full saturation, and as a result the work can look somewhat gray. In my next piece I'm going to pick and choose a color palette from scratch and force myself to work only with fully-saturated colors as an experiment.

A significant point of note with this painting is how I tried to eliminate any arbitrary linework. By using a 2b pencil on the same layer as the painting, the oils touch up the digitally rendered graphite and created vague outlines between shapes instead of high contrast borders. I was able to put lines only where I thought they were appropriate, and while I wouldn't presume I've been 100 percent successful, I feel like it's a large step forward from my previous attempts which tended to look very illustrated and unemotional.