#boxcar

The idea for the capsule art started here:

...with this sketch done in September. Of course, everyone online says "hire a capsule artist" but I 1) don't have a budget and 2) should posses or be able to learn the necessary skills myself and 3) am stubborn. But it was still difficult to find an idea that worked and looked good and would be legible at small sizes.

I began work again on October 7th.

After trialing a few different shots, this screenshot, taken in the Godot editor, served as the basis for the drawing:

I started with a basic traced sketch, and then worked on the tracks, which are in any train drawing one of the hardest things to get right.

Our game is too low res for switch tracks to have accurate frogs and points, but that's no excuse for my drawing to get it wrong! The tracks were drawn making use of a perspective snap tool in firealpaca and switching between various vanishing points.

The locomotive's front engine set has been artificially pivoted to give it a little more dynamic appearance and make it read more readily as a Mallet.

Next was the line art. The car models in game are designed to be seen at a very low resolution, but that doesn't mean I can't add some more interesting detail and variation to the drawing, just as I have done in the past for the steam engine.

The line-art for the cars was completed, then the buildings and forklift.

I like to do the background/scenery before I do the foreground elements (vehicles and people), because it makes it easier to color and render the scene.

The drawing was then colored, largely by color picking from the reference image.

And after a break, I finished the rendering. The shiny tanker and the graffiti boxcar were my favorites.

The lettering is traced-over impact with some of the shapes changed. The "MIS" in Misconductor was freehanded. The text is not in perspective with the rest of the image--if it was, the word would be pretty much illegible at all but maximum size--but I think it has a decent compromise between legibility and flowing into the scene.

The dark foliage at the left was introduced in an attempt to build an overall value gradient from lower left to upper right, as recommended by @msasterisk

Now the hope, of course, had been that this would look legible even at the smaller sizes specified by Steam's capsule art documentation.

That resulted in this. I think this is still pretty legible in terms of what the scene is depicting, while still giving plenty of space to a name that is quite difficult to fit in a small space legibly.

Well. I thought that. Then I looked at how it appears at smaller sizes:

well that's not. great. Put a pin in it.

The other variants of the art were a pretty straightforward matter of resizing the text and then resizing and cropping the rest of the image.

The small capsule art eluded me, until I realized that we already have a good solution for art that has to be legible at a small resolution... the game itself!

It's still pretty legible even at small size!