This is the first bit of box art I've worked on and it was a pleasure. All games / products released for use with Nintendo hardware, such as the Wii, have to pass their quality standards, it wont get released as an official product unless they are happy with it, so I was really pleased (and relieved!) when my cover was signed off by Nintendo to appear on the pack and the promotional stuff!
Here's the final cover (back/spine/front):
Originally the concept for the packaging was to have a cartoony style to the artwork, below is the colour rough I produced to get across ideas while working with Creative:
That style didn't really settle well with this product so it was time for an overhall, for me to check out some more reference and crack on in another direction. We agreed a stylized realistic look would work better. So I quickly knocked up the following sketch:
By this point I was on the right sort of track however more realism was needed so I just painted more detail in. I chose the dramatic pose initially for a cartoon style but it dawned on me later I would need to paint in a 'sort of realistic' style but without a photo of a model in this position with all the firefighter kit on, yikes! Photorealism isn't my forte, although I'll give anything a bash so I cracked on and in the end I was happy with the result:
I added two guys in the background and made all the elements separate, so that they could be used for promotional material. I produced the artwork on an A3 sized canvas, that way if they wanted to use my artwork for posters etc it would be better if they didn't have to upscale from the smaller Wii box size. It turns out they were printed quite large for the E3 display as freestanding cutout statues.
Here's some of the key elements broken down:
During the project I had a play with some of my art layers to create a street art stencil style:
I hope you enjoy the game and thanks for reading!
