30-Day Drawing Challenge: Day 6

"The enemy's gate is down."

Day 6 is my favorite character from a book that hasn't been made into a movie yet.  This is soon to change, since Ender's Game is finally being adapted to film after many years of development shenanigans.  I figured I'd better draw some fanart now before all the images in my head get warped by the movie.  That is, if I decide to see it instead of boycotting it.  But that's another matter.  Anyway...

So this is the famous zero-gravity battle room.  Salamander Army (green-green-brown) has not quite adapted to zero-g, and is attempting to keep themselves oriented the way they were facing in the corridor outside.  Meanwhile Ender, decked out in the grey-orange-grey uniform of Dragon Army, has easily reoriented to the position that makes the most sense strategically, throwing himself "down" towards the enemy gate and tucking his knees up to shield him from oncoming blasts.

This image was quite complicated and took a lot of planning and research, but in the end it was quite fun to make.  I looked at photos of astronauts, motorcyclists, Tron costumes, and other Ender's Game fan art. Here's some WIP stuff:

Modelling the background in Maya.

Planning out Ender's pose with a temp model. Why does she have such freakishly long legs?

Sketching Ender with drapery reference photos. I don't own a spacesuit so I made do with snow pants and a jacket.

Rotating the canvas to sketch in Salamander Army.

Inks. Had to pull out my tablet laptop since I hate drawing clean lines on a Wacom. It's much more natural to rotate the canvas than to twist my arm.

Flat color. After that it's just making stuff look shiny. :)

The funny thing about Ender's Game is the minimal amount of physical detail given for characters and places - the majority of the book revolves around thoughts and actions.  I re-read the book for the zillionth time to see if I missed anything prior to starting my piece, and realized that there wasn't much to miss.  I tried my best to compile all the details that I could piece together - red and white buttons on the guns, army colors lighting up the corridor, handholds in the battle room, etc.  I wasn't about to draw all 40 kids from both armies though!  It was interesting to see how other fans interpreted the book.

The next challenges will not be nearly so involved.  But I had to do Ender's Game justice.  It helped me get through a difficult growing stage.