Sewing an optionsmenu

One week left until final. As graphic artists we are running out of things to do, and are mostly just polishing what we have, and adding some extras. One of those extras was that of a background for our options menu.

In our main menu screen, the options are reached by clicking on the sewing machine.

As such, we wanted some continuity and chose to switch the screen to one centering on the sewing machine itself, and center all the options around it.

Our lead artist did a sketch of how he wanted it to look, and sent it to me for quality assurance. I agreed that it looked good, but asked him to further define everything about it:

One thing I’ve found over the duration of this project is that, as a clean-up artist, taking an undefined sketch and trying to define every line digitally, is very, very time consuming. Thus, I always try to push for the sketches to have as clean lines as possible, as re-sketching something that doesn’t look right is a lot easier and quicker than trying to do the same in Illustrator with paths.

Although it could still be a bit more clear about what everything is and not, it had to suffice. I then started to line out as much as possible, using the ordinairy paths in Illustrator. Grouping these together and turning them into ‘live paint groups’ allowed me to give everything a temporary color (or value rather, since it’s in grayscale) to delete overlapping lines to make sure that everything closer to the camera covered everything behind it.

I send the first version above to get early feedback on if I’m heading in the right direction. This is something I find very useful as I don’t have to redo as much if I’m completely wrong. One of the things that I failed at due to an undefined sketch was that the cloth on the table should have run all the way to the far end of the brightly shaded table, which I misinterpreted completely (it makes sense though so part of the fault is me not thinking clearly). Also he wanted me to turn all the detailes on the sewing machine and turn them silver, like the text.

One thing I also realized myself was, that the image I’d been working on was not at all the correct aspect ratio for the game. As the game is based on HD, the aspect ratio should ahve been 16×9.

I fixed this by simply adding more space on both the left side and the right and extended the table to fit. I also changed everything that I’d been told to do and voila, an options menu: