This image is entitled 'Tough Love'. Partly inspired by the current economic turmoil it's the portrait of a couple that have descended into criminality against the backdrop of a once prosperous consumer driven European country. It's in some ways intended to echo Bonnie and Clyde and their spiral into notoriety during the Great Depression of the 30s.

The piece and all assets were created at Slide by myself and our TD over a few weeks between the day to day tasks of running a small studio. The purpose of the image was twofold. Firstly it was to be a principle production illustration that would establish an art direction for an 'imagined' larger production. For this we wanted to try to create an oppressive mood, with light, shadow and detail pressing in on the characters while they stand in a 'defiantly relaxed' pose. The second purpose was to give us a test project that would allow us to amalgamate all the new processes and techniques we've learnt over the past 18 months into a new, internal 'best practice' pipeline. As we're an illustration and animation studio this all had to be done in an animation friendly way.

For more info on our thought process, influences and goals you can take a look at the WIP thread ( http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=43&t=674313 ).

(We'll make the hi-res version available along with a 'making of' soon, I'll update this thread when that's ready).