Stephen Bliss

Stephen Bliss, an experienced artist who's created highly acclaimed work for over three decades. His most famous work was during the 2001-2016 employment at Rockstar Games, where he was responsible for the iconic recognisable artstyle of the hit game series 'GrandTheft Auto' or 'GTA'

as well as also for 'Red Dead Redemption' and 'The Warriors'.

However even before working on those games, Bliss worked with Japanese fashion brand, 'Hysteric Glamour', Nintendo, Pepsi and Sony just to name a few.

After his departure from longtime position at Rockstar Games, Bliss went on to produce art gallery shows and is currently working on his own NFT series on the Ethereum blockchain.

With 6 different characters, the NFT series has now also expanded to create a clothing line and storyboard.

Stephen Bliss has a realistic artstyle approach often with heavy black shadowing and blocky base colours.

His colouring consists of mostly the base colour, a slightly darker shade and a slightly lighter shade for the gradual tone shift.

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This was my own take on his art style:

First a threshold was created, and I used a pale pink background to compliment the skin tone. By using a threshold, I was able to create the iconic black shadowing easily, however,

it was an issue when I had to paint over the black in unneat lines as I wasnt able to seperate the layers of the threshold from black and white.

You can see here, the issue descrbibed above where the soft pen pressure I used merged with the black outlines of the threshold. I later fixed it by creating a seperate layer on top where I would draw out the black hair parts framing the face so that the skin and hair wouldn't mix. As for the colouring, I used the simple lighter shade darker shade approach to keep it simple but still realistic.

Here, I added brown in a gradient effect and small highlights to create the eyes. I added eyelashes that weren't detected in the threshold to accentuate the eyeshape. For the hair highlights, I just used a dark grey with 60% opacity set and layered it on: the more the light the more the layers. Using that technique I created a 'ring' around the top to mimic the hair shine. In this layer, I also added the extra face framing strands in order to not mix the skin and hair together.

Conclusion:

This is my final piece that I feel I am satisfied with. For next time, I think I would add more colour to the skin as to not make it so greyish and more shadows for tone definition. I wouldv'e blended out the hair highlights more and you can still see from some of the side hair pieces that they're a little fuzzy. One detail I noticed after, is that there is often a black outline of the nose in Bliss' artstyle which I will add for the next attempt.