I’ve wanted to make a post talking about how I make my work and what goes into it, but because of various things going on at once I never really had the time to sit down and do it.
But now I do have that time so here we go!
The thumbnail for Vesteria is my latest game artwork and one of my favorite thumbnails I’ve ever made, putting together the vibrant models of the mobs/characters and the world was a blast.
I began working on this piece by making a concept of the thumbnail, berezaa requested the scene to be the three in-game classes facing up against all of the enemies in Vesteria. Usually, if the developer doesn’t have a clear idea for what they want for the thumbnail I try to come up with a couple of concepts for what could be done, but this time it wasn’t needed.
I made this simple black and white sketch to show what the final could look like:
Aside from replacing the spider queen with the yeti, everything was okay, so I went ahead and started working on the 3D part of the thumbnail
And this is where I ran into my first problem. Most of the mobs/characters in Vesteria are vertex painted and characters with vertex painted details don’t export with them.
Ignoring this issue I went ahead and imported the rest of the characters into the scene along with making a simple floor for them to stand on. My main idea was to have everyone running towards or looking the 3 classes.
After the image was rendered out and the photoshop paint over process began.
The image above is already looking way better, I tend to do most of the work for my thumbnails in photoshop. I went around the whole image and cleaned up every single character, making their color schemes fit the ones in-game and re-adding the missing vertex painted details. I added rims along the edges of each character to make them more easily noticeable. Most of the background isn’t rendered, I used screenshots from Roblox studio for the trees and houses, the same was done for the trees in the foreground. Rendering out the background would have taken way more time and the difference would have been minimal, everything was matched together using the blue from the sky as a sort of fog along with color correction. It wasn’t my first time using studio screenshots for the main parts of thumbnails, the same was done for my SHRED thumbnail and Vehicle Simulator fanart, along with many other things like game icons.
This is the final version of the thumbnail, I made the grass more detailed and used the same Roblox studio screenshot technique for the rocks that the characters are standing on. I added a white glow behind the area surrounding the yeti, it helps the characters pop out a bit more. I also made the image overall brighter and more vibrant. Aside from that all of the other changes were small color changes.
That basically covers how the thumbnail was made, I do think that my 3D workflow is very weak compared to what I can do in photoshop, it leads to me not doing enough work in my renderer and leaving way too much to clean up in 2D.
I really enjoyed writing about how I make my work, if anyone has any questions about anything please ask, I am also open to constructive critique for this thumbnail so my next artwork could look even better! 
Thanks for reading.
