Ghost hunters

For visual development portfolios, often people take an existing story with characters and put their own twist on it. For this project I had an idea of designing my own story about a father and son ghost hunter that travel in their ghost hunting van to catch ghosts. They then arrive in an abandoned town where things take an unexpected twist. 

For the father and son design I wanted to make them very similar to make it clear that they are related but have them, have very different personalities. I wanted the father to be small and definitely have a strong personality since he has to compensate for his height. I wanted him to be very loud and have no mercy when it comes to ghost hunting.

The son is more innocent and scared. He is tall, lanky and definitely has an interest for the ghost girl. He is in charge of the camera to take pictures of the ghosts which is pretty passive while the father is the one in charge of catching them with his ghost catching vacuum device.

This is a facial guide I created for the father to help with blendshapes if the 2d design was created in 3d. On the right is a close-up render of the ghost girl.

This is the ghost van where the father and son spend most of their time. The van has many of the haunted artifacts that the father and son have found during their hunts. There is also computers and different machines where they can check their footage and see if they caught ghosts.

This is the PLASMA-F1, a plasma sensitive camera that is specially custom made with many different settings to catch a ghost on film.

My process starts with the sketch which is often pretty loose. I then block the main colors and start adding details where I know there won't be any foreground elements. I then add the mid-ground elements and more details. To create atmosphere I like to use textured brushes and play around with the blending modes of the layers to get cool effects. Once everything is painted I like to add an adjustment layer to make sure there is good contrast and play with the colors with the curve editor.

These are some of the haunted houses that the ghost hunters explore.