You might want to avoid making the naughty list this year…
This is one santa thats going out the front door.

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I get asked a lot by other workshoppers how I put these stickers together, here we go: An idea pops in my head, normally when I'm doing other things - its usually either something that amuses me or a well formed vision - both are great motivators; in this particular case to get the ball rolling on making that vision real I started with the negev; I used the SDK model viewer to get it in maybe 10 different positions, then screen grabbed & printed a couple. I then used one angle as a basis for the rest of the sketch.

In figure drawing my method has always been to start with a stick man to work out the joints and foreshortening, then flesh out to volumetric shapes. Once fleshed out enough I scan in the sketch and start drawing in the ink in illustrator using custom brushes or strokes with variable widths - (sometimes I work the other way drawing the fills first, but it really depends on the illustration style. Also note as you can see from the developments slide I tried something different this time: I tried to paint using photoshop, but it was my first foray into digital painting and as such it sucked pretty bad! So after a couple of hours I aborted that approach in favour of vector art.)

I build up a lot of detail and make major refinements in illustrator, I'm actually very average at sketching so don't spend too long at that stage in favour of embellishing later on computer. I've only ever worked with a mouse - no stylus yet - although I'm tempted to give one of those new Wacom jobs a try just for the pressure variation in photoshop. The illustrator / photoshop process takes a long long time, I make fiddly tweaks over several days, sometimes weeks. Once I have something I'm happy with I figure out how to translate that image to each decal style. This process is the longest for me as I work in mac OS then boot to windows where CS and VTFedit are installed. Any tweaks require resaving, rebooting, replacing the VTFs, then evaluating in the model viewer. After saving a screengrab I reboot again, then address all the things I'm not happy with back on Mac side. Rinse and repeat. To save time I often save out multiple options to test so I don't have to reboot all the time. Somewhere around version 10 I have something that I'm happy to submit.

Presentation stage - I go into the model viewer and save out tons of images with a key colour, starting with the sticker preview, progressing to the sticker in context on a few select weapons. I also record a video using fraps to show off the holo/foil effect. I reboot to mac and process the images using an action I made in photoshop to mask out the key colour. I then place the masked images into a template presentation doc. The holo video gets converted to a format that will work with After effects, which I use to trim the length and convert to a TIFF sequence, the sequence is then imported into photoshop via Bridge (tools>photoshop>'load files into photoshop layers') where I crop to a size and set the animation settings; eventually saving as an animated GIF. Only last things to make now are the description text, workshop thumbnail, and nav banners that I place below the description.

The overall process for each submission takes me 1-2 weeks, mostly during evenings and weekends. So there you go!

If you'd like to see this sticker in the game please rate above, thanks!