After working polishing up the Original Lara Croft Relic Run keyart, Square Enix again approached Fire Without Smoke to give it an entirely new refresh for the new ‘Mountain Pass’ update.

As huge Lara fans we wanted to make sure we did the job justice and began scamping furiously to get our layout correct. Set in the snowy mountains we wanted Lara dressed appropriately for the weather. Shorts and vest, although iconic, didn’t seem right for an icy environment!

Once we’d got our composition, we got to work digitally painting Lara with extremely fine detail – right down to the the fur on her collar. Everything was painted in greyscale for lighting and tone before we began adding full colour and textures. The background plate was painted using exactly the same method, taking care to extend the image left and right to allow for different compositional crops.

To create a new standout icon for App Stores we created a suite of options so we could test before finally settling on the incredibly painted ‘Guns’ artwork.

Here you can see some of the art, the icons and the thought process to achieve a result that both Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics could associate with the iconic Lara Croft.