I made the concept for Halloran House back in 2019 if I’m not wrong, for the Tales platform.

If you’re not familiar with it, Tales makes interactive stories for mobile devices. The story lines are consistently well written, captivating and imaginative, so I was always happy to contribute to the visual side of their content.

From 2017 to 2020 I made a huge bunch of artwork for them, and Halloran House was the location of one of the tales, set in New Orleans.

There’s not much I can tell about the project without spoiling the story, unfortunately, so I guess you’ll have to play it if you want to know more.

Anyway, the briefs for the stories always came in batches of 10-12 illustrations each, so I was forced to be quite time-efficient to avoid spending three months on each story.

This is when I started introducing photobashing in my work.

For those who are not familiar with the procedure, photbashing is the practice of combining together bits and pieces from existing pictures, then to tweak colours, values and all the rest to make a coherent composition.

It’s fairly standard in concept art, as it’s very time-efficient and it allows you to save the time you would waste on minor details like, I don’t know, power outlets or door handles.

Despite it being accepted and common practice, I always feel unreasonably guilty when I bash together stock images. So I always end up using them only to have a believable perspective grid and overall palette, and then I compulsively paint over as much as I can.

The end result is always something in the range of 85% painted and 15% textures and pasted details, which is a good mix between the realistic and hand-painted look I was after for Halloran House.

I was toying with the idea of making a big giant post with the whole load of concepts I made for Tales.
Then I changed my mind thinking it was better to post them one by one, so you won’t have the impression that I only make Star Wars things.

Long story short, I’ll sprinkle them here and there on this space in the weeks to come.

by Paolo Puggioni