Assassin's Creed

I drew the initial sketch with my Wacom Intuos tablet in the art program, Paint Tool SAI. Once I had finalized it a bit and broken down the shapes, I moved the image into Photoshop CC 2017. I make good use of a "style" I made in photoshop to get the outline effect, especially because it works so well with the art style itself, it also means I don't have to sit and manually make sure each block goes around the Assassin symbol. I did however make the wall-pattern myself, both along the top and the main brick.

Overall, the image was done with the pen tool, creating each shape and tweaking it as needed to fit the look I desired.

Assassin's Creed was released by Ubisoft in 2007 as a launch title for the Xbox 360.

Assassin's Creed was a weird game for me -- at first I actually really disliked it, and barely got into it before ditching it to play something else. It wasn't until months later I put it back in the console and decided to give it an honest try that suddenly I realized how much I really loved the game. I'll not say it's without flaws, 'cause there are a lot, but you have to give the game credit -- it had large goal and it went for it.

Earlier this year, I replayed through all the Assassin's Creed games (mostly because I had never finished AC:Unity and AC:Syndicate), and even after looking at all the advances the newer games have brought to the series ... the original still stands at the top of my list. So if there was any Assassin's Creed game I was going to draw, it was going to be the one that started the whole series.

Of the portfolio drawings, this was the first one I worked on, mostly because when I did my initial thumbnail sketches, this was one that when I looked back over them, I knew I liked this design. Granted, it still changed a bit from the original, but that's pretty much par for the course, isn't it?

The references for this were a bit interesting to try and find -- especially since AC came out before consoles were actually able to capture screenshots or video themselves, so most of the images I found tended to come from the PC port which hardly anyone has because it was so horrid.

Eventually I made it work -- Altair himself is based off a screenshot from AC:Unity since his outfit was an unlockable costume and since AC:Unity was on a newer engine and console, it also meant Altair's outfit was much higher resolution than anything I'd get from the original game.

The city view is actually based off a screenshot from the game, and I believe it was Jerusalem, but I could be wrong. The colors for the eagle were based off an "action figure" eagle packaged with some of various Assassin's Creed models.