Quill, Marmoset Toolbag & Photoshop - Use VR Tools To Build Up An Image

Freelance illustrator martin nebelong paints in virtual reality to create the base for a book cover illustration, before finishing it in Photoshop.

In this workshop I’ll be taking you through the process of making an illustration for a Danish author, Nanna Foss, who’s written a paranormal sci-fi book series called Spektrum, aimed at a teen audience. I’ll take you through the steps of quickly mocking up and composing the scene in Quill (VR), and once this is done, I’ll talk about how to light and present the scene in Marmoset Toolbag to add mood to the VR sketch.

With those elements in place, I’ll finally take the illustration into Photoshop and add finish and details through the use of textures and painting. My workshop is mainly focused on the steps before Photoshop, because there’s been plenty of ImagineFX tutorials by better artists than me on this part of the painting process!

Creating art in VR is still in its early days, but it’s evolving at a rapid pace and it’s exciting to see how much the tools have already improved over what we had just a year ago. In my daily work as an illustrator, I find that VR sketches works well compared to traditional sketches. It gives you more freedom when you’re composing the scene, enables you to easily reuse elements, and makes it simple to experiment with light, colours, material properties and so on.

This scene is set outdoors and VR is great here, but for architectural scenes and difficult perspective compositions, I’ve found that it’s extremely powerful too.

1 Character and environment breakdown