Be Greater. Together
Two for Two
Spider-Man needs no introduction. And with his sequel having recently released at the time, my inspiration for this piece was at an all time high. I had an idea to incorporate both of them. I didn't quite know how or what. But I knew I wanted to use the iconic logo and recreate it in some way. I also wanted both characters to mirror each other in some way and feature their new powers from the game. After a long conceptualization period, the pieces finally came together in a really satisfying way. Instead of using the logo, have both Spider-Man form the logo! Miles could form one half with his electricity, and Pete could form the other half with the symbiote.
Yes, I'm a nerd. But the result of that is a piece I'm really proud of and I think had a really interesting way of being made. I used screenshots of the characters from the game and brought that into photoshop to edit. I used the games 'photomode' to get a characters in a position I liked and repeated it for the other one. It was something I never considered before and I think is what makes this piece unique compared to my other works
IDEATION
Like I mentioned previously, I wanted the following things:
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Both characters mirroring each other
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Both characters forming a spider logo
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Showcase of their new abilities
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A sense of movement/speed
Assets Used
Drafts
Before I move on, I just have to mention that if you look closely at the picture, you can see Mile's ribcage because of how bright the lighting coming from his chest is. Its a detail I noticed in the game and knew I had to replicate because I think its just so cool. Also the symbiote and lightning effects were done by me from scratch in photoshop itself, which is why there are no assets for it above.
Draft 1: There was only one draft for this piece before the colour adjustments I made before posting. So this explanation is going to be a little long since there's a lot to cover. Firstly, the base models of each character was gotten from the game itself. Through the games photomode, I took each character and jumped off the same building in order to get their falling animation. In the final piece, I flip them upside down instead so they look like they're rising instead.
I jumped of the same spot of the same building at the same time of day. This was to ensure the lighting for both characters would remains consistent as I had to do each character separately. I also took an alternate variation of each character in case I needed to change any part of them. The green screen shown is from the games photomode where I could filter out the game world and replace it with the green screen. This helped massively in cutting them out.
I started with Miles first as I had no idea at the time how to create the symbiote tendrils for Pete.
The lighting shape and jaggedness was quite simple as it was mostly random. As long as I followed the spider logo, the lighting could randomly crack and twist. The tricky part was having to create different smaller branches within the main branch of the lightning. It had to look like each main branch was also splintering, similar to how lightning normally reacts.
Also, I had to add several of colour doges and blue highlights to not just each lightning branch, but miles too. Look closely at Miles and you can see his suit, legs, and arms all have different kinds of blue highlights on them with different intensities too. This really made the lightning feel like a source of light.
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Miles' chest was also the source of the lightning, which meant it had to be the absolute brightest. As I said previously, I added his ribcage to show just how bright the light emitting from him was. It's my favourite detail despite being one that probably everyone who sees the piece will miss
Moving to Pete is where I encountered a major hurdle. How was I going to create the symbiote tendrils? This question was very specific and there was virtually nothing online to help me with this problem. The tendrils had to be random and flowy, while also having highlights and shadows. I was literally trying to create an alien goo
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Then came in what I'll describe as a big brain idea. After a long time I thought of using a smoke brush.
A smoke brush as the name suggests, is a brush you can download that creates smoke for images. It's main purpose is to capture the complex details of smoke without people having to manually do it themselves. An example of smoke brushes is above.
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Smokes was the perfect tool for me as is had the fluidity of the tendrils I was looking for. It also had this randomness and movement to it that would be nearly impossible to replicate naturally. It was really just perfect
I added smoke, turned it black, warped it to the spider logo shape, and added some Bevel and Emboss which gives it s 3D look. I also overlapped multiple smoke brushes on each leg of the spider to make it seem even more chaotic and symbiote like. At the end, it looked almost identical to how the symbiote tendrils should. While there are differences, they were negligible as the tendrils I was able to make were good enough that people viewing would be able to identify them as such. Therefore, with both Miles and Pete down, it was time for some final adjustments and colour corrections
The end result is something I think is pretty special. The spider logo makes up the entire image while not being overpowering. Each character and their powers is represented well. And the process of making the piece was something so fun and out of the box at times that I learned a surprising amount from this piece as a whole. I also got to make something unique I think as I haven't seen something like this for the game be done anywhere else. It's definitely a cool looking piece and I think it does justice to the source material of these characters