Imaginary cover art for The Riff

Inspired by the visual style of graphic novels I decided to create a new non-photorealistic 3D illustration using Blender. This is also going to be featured in my summer project that I'm currently working on if all goes well. Here's the final result:

This imaginary cover art illustration is based on the lyrics of a heavy rock song called The Riff by my favorite band Lordi. I try not to do too much fanart nowadays but I felt that the lyrics alone gave me enough freedom to use my own ideas! The lyrics tell a vague story about a man that gets picked up by Mr. Death himself driving an old Chevy. The grim reaper takes the narrator on a dreamlike road trip that ends up in a car crash: The reaper bites the dust but the man survives.

To start off I've been modeling the Chevrolet Impala 1959 convertible car model from scratch for quite some time. It's one of those things that every 3D modeler has to go through at least once in their time. Not to mention the fact that Industrial Designers are usually car freaks.. even though I'm not that much. Creating the car replica was a project on its own that I've been working on and off in my spare time. Every detail is modeled by hand based on various reference photos that I found online.

I used MakeHuman to create a generic male character that fits the role of the narrator. However I had to tweak the weighting of the rig to make it work correctly inside Blender. The grim reaper was made using an existing skeleton 3D model from blendswap.com that I then customised further: I modeled the horns, the ragged robe and attached a pair of sunglasses that I had already created by myself.

To create the two-toned look of the rendered images I used a non-photorealistic shader. All that I have in the scenes is one sun lamp that provides even illumination from one uniform direction. The final shade of the surfaces is based on the illumination and is either black or white.

Here's a couple of viewport views inside Blender:

The final image compositing was quite tough to pull off and it involved lots of experimenting back and forth between Blender and Gimp that I use for image editing:

Foreground elements with no visible contact shadows

Shadow pass I used to create the inverted shadows

Rendered grim reaper element

In the final cover art image I added a black bar behind the grim reaper to fit the text inside. It was the same license plate font from dafont.com that I used in the car's plate. Overall this illustration was insanely fun to create and it shows that not every render has to be photorealistically created to have a strong impact.