Adding Illustrations
I spent some time thinking about the concept of my board game this week and came up with four illustrations that tie into the game.
The Mustang
The Ford Mustang is one of my "dream" cars to own after graduation, so I decided to centralize the theme around it. To craft it, I found a photo online and used it as a stencil to trace it. Then, I started customizing the colors of the car. I decided to use these colors because it's almost exactly how I want my dream car to look. At first, the windshield was a solid gray color. I wanted to add a reflection off of it, so I changed it to a gradient fill. As you can see in the image, the windshield starts with a "white" and slowly fades across, gradually getting darker.
I made sure to be organized throughout the process, so I used multiple sub-layers. By doing this, I am able to change the color of any of the parts on the car. For example, if I want the body color to be white, I select the sub-layer and change the color. All the other layers will not be affected. Let's say I wanted to change the stripe to be "blue". The same concept applies.
The flag is placed at the center of the board, to attract the user's eye to the finish line, where you win the game. Initially, I started with an outline of the flag. Once the outline was completed, I started working on the white checkers. Each white checker is a separate layer placed onto a single black layer. By crafting it this way, I avoided having to draw each and every checker piece on the flag. Also, I can easily change the color of the white squares because they are in their own sub-layer. For the colors, I just went with the traditional racing flag colors. Didn't have to give much thought to that.
NOS
The idea behind the NOS is that when you land on a space containing the NOS image, you get to move forward +3 spaces.
As you can see, I made use of the gradient fill again. Twice! The bottle was initially a solid blue, but I didn't like how "plain" it looked. I wanted to give the bottle a reflective shine. The fitting coming from the bottle to the valve also has a gradient fill. Again, I chose to use the traditional colors that compose a bottle of NOS.
Police Lights
If you land on a space containing the police lights image, you will lose your next turn.
I came up with this drawing rather quickly. I drew one light and then mirrored it. After that, I drew the siren in the center. Initially, one light was blue and the other red. Then, I wanted to add the effect that the lights were engaged. It may not be perfect, but I used my favorite tool: gradient fill.
This is close to the final look and feel of the gameboard. I already have a few changes in mind. I want to put the directions above the car and make them larger. This will give me room to enlarge the title and add some graphics around it. Also, I want to make a pile of cash illustration to add to the theme of winning the race. I am thinking about placing it on the right side of the finish line flag.
