Suburban Survivor

The Last of Us is another of my very most favourite games. I really loved the story, the gradual father and daughter bond which grows between Joel and Ellie, all of the emotional moments and the really interesting and difficult moral choices which the characters have to make. The gameplay is very fun and smooth and hard to put down as well ( just like books on anti-gravity ^_~ ). I loved that gaming got another strong female character in Ellie. I love her attitude and tomboyish-ness, and also that she actually looks just like an everyday normal girl instead of being an overly glamorized character. I’ve been wanting to create a fully coloured illustration of her for some time now, so she now finally gets a place in my gallery ^^  

I spent a lot of time applying different textures to the background, using different speckled brushes with the Brush, Eraser and Blur tools to help achieve the effects that I wanted. Ellie’s T-shirt logo was created in a separate file and then pasted into the main piece. I wanted to make sure that it had a faded look as in the game so I brought the opacity down low and also erased some areas in subtle patches ( again by using a speckled brush on the Eraser ). I also used the Warp tool to subtly curve the T-shirt logo around the shape of her body. The red of the shirt looks a bit brighter here than it was originally intended to be due to changing the image over from CMYK to RGB in order to be able to upload it to Deviantart. I find it hard to tell exactly which eye colour Ellie has since sometimes they look light blue and other times they look more of a light green, so I tried to choose an inbetween shade to use for her.