Manning the Guns

i made this to submit to warframe's tennocon 2020 fan forge contest.

it was interesting to draw warframes again. after working way too long on a piece that ended up ultimately unfinished, i didn't really want to draw them again. i sunk dozens of hours into that piece and went down a rabbit hole, drawing in every last detail. i bit off more than i could chew and decided not to do that again for a while.
it's been a good two or three years since then, and i feel like i've improved my process enough to take another crack at it, this time avoiding the maximum level of detail for three reasons. one, i couldn't afford the time it'd take for me to shade every last detail in. two, as i developed a style for the piece, more detail would ruin the aesthetic i was going for.
i started by drawing the artillery guns here, and the more minimalist blocky shading naturally lended itself to a lower level of detail. three, because this design was created with print media in mind, i didn't want tiny details to muddy up the design when it was printed on a tiny 3" surface.

it was also... interesting... drawing on such a massive canvas. the original canvas size was 6600x9600, fit to print on the biggest print size fan forge offers. at some point, photoshop started choking on all of the pixels and layers it had to handle, and so the final stages of editing took me way longer to do.
actually drawing the design probably took me somewhere around 8-10 hours or so. additional editing for all of the different versions for fan forge, wallpapers, and posts probably took up another four hours. so all in all, very effort-heavy piece. but, really, the hardest part was painting the design. things are much less clear-cut in painting than they are in just editing up the final versions.

originally completed june 19th, 2020.