Presenting the twenty-ninth skin in my very first collection, the SCAR-20 | Rising Tide!

One thing I noticed about making such a large amount of skins with the same design is that it has forced me to look for ways to improve in areas other than just the artwork.

In the case of this skin I paid a new level of attention to the detailing aspect. I had drawn the skin to be an all over print, and I was aware that there would be areas I would have to omit the design from to make the skin look more grounded. One of these areas was the attachment that sticks up from the stock of the gun.

I filled this area in with the neutral navy blue colour that I use for accents and the sky on the design, but I felt like that lacked detail. I decided to try something which I had not yet done for any of my skins which is add a physical texture to the area. I took the default deagle texture and extracted the leather pattern from the grip of the gun, then applied it to the attachment. I was happy with how it composed with the rest of the design, but it still looked cheap and unprofessional to me. I knew then that to make it look right I had to try something which had intimidated me from the beginning but wanted to learn how to do, which was adding a normal map.

I have ideas in my head for future designs that would require normals which meant I was going to have to learn this eventually, so I decided to try it out. Thankfully photoshop has tools to generate a normals from a texture which I had not known of prior, and it was quite easy to create the normal map and tweak it to my desired settings. For future skins with more advanced incorporations of normal mapping technology I will have to gain a greater understanding of how it actually works without AI doing all the thinking, but for now I am happy to have finally dipped my toes into the water.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my collection, I am excited to be on the brink of finally completing it. I can’t wait to get going with my next series which I already have completely planned out. I miss the feeling I had at the start of the collection of exploring new artistic ideas, however setting that aside has (as mentioned before) helped me improve in other ways that will make any design I make in the future turn out far greater than it would have otherwise. Only five more guns left to go and then it’s all done! If you like what you see and are interested in what’s to come consider giving my workshop a follow, it would make my day :) Otherwise, thank you for your time!

Check out the rest of the collection: