28 // Completing the Character Designs and Turnarounds

So this is the last thing I had left to complete for this project; the turnarounds.

Not much to say here, they'd more or less made themselves along the way, from early development to final illustration. There were still some areas of each design left to be figured out, but overall it was fairly straightforward.

It could be said that I should really have completed these before producing the illustrations, but I'd argue that the illustrations were never intended to be each character's final appearance, merely a stepping stone towards the final product. Also, drawing the characters up in illustration format first gave me the opportunity to see what was or wasn't working, and adapt the design to suit.

The project was a fun experience, with highs, lows, new and old techniques alike, and plenty of fun.

Here's hoping the designs are - despite being quite unoriginal - successful in what I set out to portray.

27 // Completing the Spellsword Illustration

After having flown through the Warlock illustration with relative ease, I set about finishing off the Spellsword girl's design. 

My first task was to decide on the colours throughout her design. Working straight into the linework for her illustration, I laid down flats in an experimental manner, trying to stumble upon the winning combo. Just about every colour combination I could think of was used in this stage (in hindsight, I should really have saved all of the variations, but I was so exhausted at the time that the thought didn't even cross my mind... having a 6-month old kid means working through the night and being absolutely shattered all day becomes commonplace, as does a semi-functional mind!).

It was actually her demonic hand that gave me the idea for her final colours; the hand kept reminding me of a gargoyle, which in turn made me think of grey demons, which led to desaturated blue and greys throughout her outfit and sword, and grey-blue hair. It took a while to get there, but it was definitely the best of a bad bunch.

With the flats worked out, I had a think about what style I would use for this illustration.

Having used cel-shading for the Warlock - and loved the process - I thought it would be a good opportunity to use a slightly altered technique for this girl. I thought of ways in which I could combine the techniques I had learnt from cels with my own personal illustration style. I applied the overall technique here and fairly enjoyed it - both the process and result.

Unlike the Warlock illustration, I hadn't planned this one very well at all, and boy was it a struggle at times!! All I knew about her was what I had in front of me... that she was sitting somewhere with a severed head in her hand. Just having this to go on kind of limited my options!

I sketched out several possible environments and moods as quickly as possible, hoping that some plausible idea would leap out at me. It took a while for me to get anything. I stretched the canvas in all directions, playing around with flow lines, focal points etc without really getting anywhere. Taking a break from it, I eventually started to try and make sense of the messy scribbles.

Shapes have a funny habit of popping out when you least expect them, and soon I was seeing cliffs and spires. I had nothing else to go on. With deadlines getting closer I figured I had to bite the bullet and just go with gut instinct. I defined the shapes I had seen, and stuck a rock under her ass, because it made a little bit of sense.

The rest of the process is a bit of a blur; by this point I was having to work all through the night while the kid slept (as she requires so much attention during the daytime that it's near-impossible to get this kind of work done) then score a couple of hours sleep on the couch in the morning, wake up and get through the day before doing the same thing again. However, sleep deprivation has it's benefits; you can sometimes get nice ideas from out of nowhere. On the other hand, your brain is more likely to refuse to function when you really need it to... which happened quite frequently here.

Anyhoos, I played with a ton of ideas during the time it took me to figure out that she was sitting next to a small bay. I didn't have too many guidelines to help me create flow around the image, so I tried to give the illustration an underlying narrative that would both enforce her evil, ruthless nature and also guide the viewer around the illustration.

I was making stuff up on the spot, throwing ideas all over the place before I finally resigned to the fact that most of them were a bit crap, so I just kept the ones that weren't completely ridiculous. I have no idea if the narrative aspect works for this piece or not... I spent so much time working on it that it no longer makes much sense when I look at it! That and I've never really tried narrative-driven-compositions before, so it's all a bit new to me. But fun, nonetheless.

When it came to colouring the BG, I knew from when I coloured the girl that I wanted the light source to be top-right. I'd been working through quite a few sunrises during this time, so that's where the idea for that came from; a nice, mellow morning setting. It sets quite an interesting atmosphere, as if the battle took place during the night and now as the sun has risen, there's calm across the bay. Similar to the Warlock illustration, it's unusual to see an evil character in a bright-ish scene.

So that's about it the gist of it for this illustration. There was a lot of juggling around towards the end of it, and there are still a lot of things I'm not happy with or would change, but time was running out for me and I had to move on.

This is the final illustration...

26 // Completing the Warlock Illustration

I forgot to mention in the previous post that the design for his staff-head was influenced by a decorative design I saw on a gate while taking a break from this piece; it caught my eye as I was out wandering with my dog, thinking about how I could use the sunlight to my advantage in the composition - the design has sunrise written all over it, so I thought it might add a nice extra element to the character design, maybe providing some sort of backstory.

Also on my wanderings, I'd decided upon the colour palette for the character: having been looking at some images of Playstation Home's Mos Eisley Cantina location, I'd been attracted to the brown/blue colour combo. I've used it before in other projects and it's definitely a favourite of mine. I think it fits the character well, as the different shades of brown robes scream hobo. Or jakey.

The blue was destined to be applied to the spell he's in the midst of casting - the two colours together add to the strange scene I'm trying to portray: an evil character in an unusually bright setting. 

One of my predetermined goals for this project was that I would try out a few different art-styles throughout my work. I'd already tried out several different sketching styles along the way, and now I was ready to try my hand at a finished piece using cel-shading - a style I haven't really touched for a couple of years.

I did a fair bit of research into how cel-shading can benefit an illustration; most notably is in cases where the lighting is quite extreme, and high-contrast is likely to occur. I figured that this piece fit the bill fairly well. Also, the jaggy shadows and edges that would be produced by the torn robes would definitely benefit from the hard edged shading, hopefully reiterating the point that this is a dangerous character (Kekai Kotaki's Evil Character Design 101: spikes, spikes and more spikes)

So I gave myself a crash-course in the basics of the technique and set to work. I discovered that careful planning and organisation will assist the entire process immeasurably, from start to finish. Layer and mask management will also allow for swift modifications to be made wherever necessary during the process. This is good to know, as you can get some very nice colour blends from the technique if you're careful and use non-destructive editing throughout the colouring stages. Having access to quick and easy colour shifts at the end of a project is always a bonus that can lead to real happy endings.

I'd been following a couple of different tutorials regarding cel-shading to begin with, just to get a feel for it, but soon found myself integrating some of my own techniques into the workflow to try and mix it up a bit. It took quite a few hours to get the entire shadow mask drawn out, but by the time it came to the end stages of colour editing, it was all worth it. The example below shows my final result on the character, which I'm pretty chuffed with.

I also decided upon the BG being based around a very desaturated light brown, to assist in the blue spell popping out from the page.

In accordance with the change in perspective from my original planning sketches, I sketched out the new BG, using a desert-type landscape with some jutting rocks for visual interest. I kept to my original plan of letting the flowing robes and clouds steer the viewer's eye around. At this point I had the idea of his power generating the wind around him, thus causing the flow. I used the clouds to create a kind of vortex around him and implemented a sort of fish-eye perspective on the vertical axis to make the composition more interesting.

I'm not entirely convinced that this worked out terribly well - the whole process altered the composition quite drastically and may have resulted in me taking it in the wrong direction, but what's done is done.

The last adjustment I made was to add a desaturated blue gradient across the sky (originally it was a lighter brown, as if within a sandstorm). The blue worked tons better for the image, unifying the palette and providing a backdrop from which the character could really pop.

So here's the final illustration...

25 // Beginning the Warlock Illustration

Since I seemed to be on a roll with this character, I moved straight onto the illustration process.

I started off with four composition variations; super-rough value sketches; no more than ten minutes each.

After picking my favourite, I tried out some lighting variations; again, super-rough; ten minutes each. In this case, my favourite was the backlit, rim-lighting style.

During this stage, I decided that I didn't want him to be holding a book in his hand. Instead, I wanted him to be caught in the middle of casting some kind of a spell that would be glowing fiercely and creating a secondary light source which would light the dark side of his face from beneath in a creepy kind of way.

I had originally planned for this illustration to be a nighttime scene, but at some point along this stage I decided to set it in a daytime, high contrast environment (I had an idea that the warm, daytime tones would provide more interest than cold and dark (also, to place an evil character in a sunny daytime setting tends to give a piece quite a strange atmosphere - it almost doesn't feel right)).

As the sketches show, I was thinking of how flow could play a role in the composition, with the clouds and robes all playing a vital role in steering the viewer's eye around the piece. I'd already established that there might be mountainous - or rough - terrain surrounding the character, so the image was gradually beginning to form in my head as I progressed.

I gathered my reference for the pose and set to work. The pose I worked with differs slightly from the original sketches, as I settled for a lower vantage point, to try and emphasise the power of this character.Working with thirds, I positioned the pose and started figuring out all the details, working and re-working different elements until I was happy enough to get on with linework.

This piece was coming together far more efficiently than the Spellsword already, mainly due to the lucky start, and some careful planning earlier.

24 // Early Development 04 - Warlock

Moving on from the Spellsword girl, it was time to give the Warllock character some love. In my first set of exploratory personality sketches, I'd tried out various age and personality options. The one which really appealed to me was that of the goatee'd bald guy, as he had an air of evil about him.

Ryan gave some real good feedback at that point, mentioning that as a character designer, it's important to consider the popular character archetypes, while considering ways that their notable elements can be mixed, matched and altered in ways to create new, but recognisable designs. I tried to heed this advice as much as possible when moving through these stages, but will say now that I think I failed completely in coming up with anything original :(

In this first image, the sketch in the bottom right is something I'd been imagining for a while (based off of the early goatee man) and managed to rattle out in twenty minutes or so. It's very close to what I had imagined; a psychotic-looking, pissed off, dangerous old man with a crazy, wiry beard and hard leather armour over the shoulders of his robes. It's not often I can pull a sketch out of my head so efficiently, so I was fairly pleased with how this was going already.

I can remember thinking that I had found my character with that sketch. The face and expression was as I wanted it, and the beard was crazy-wizard-looking enough that it would likely do just fine. I tested out a few alternative hair/beard designs to make sure I wasn't jumping the gun. A couple of these designs were from reference, the majority from mind. By the end of my tests, the original was still winning, despite it's unoriginality.

Even though I liked the simple look of the first leather armour layers in the sketch, I thought it best to try a couple of variations on that too. I tried adding more layers and details in places, but I had in mind a story for this character; a world-weary Warlock whose powers are so immense that he has no real need for lavish, decorative armour. I imagined him to be a bit of a hobo-looking guy, whose hidden powers and psychotic nature would make him a dangerous character despite his lack of stature-defining garments. He'd be someone who travelled the world, kicking ass all over the place, searching for greater powers.

It was going pretty smoothly so far with this guy, so I moved swiftly on and started testing out some lower outfit ideas.

Layers of leather and robes were the main elements I wanted to carry through the design, so I tried out different material ideas; furs; decorative drapes; buckles; armoured or worn leather boots; thick stitching; trousers etc. It was the third iteration that stayed most true to his already fairly established hobo style; torn robes and worn boots with a fur belt and big evil-looking buckle design

Even though this kind of look has probably been used on wizard characters a hundred-thousand times, it just felt right with this guy. I wasn't doing anything super-original, but I'd try my best to do it well.

23 // Beginning the Spellsword Illustration

I was desperate to get back to working out the Spellsword character design, after my failed experiment, so started to think about what I could do for her final illustration.

I'd already settled on keeping her looking quite sexy, with a fantasy-styled armour set and magical weaponry. I then started to think about how I could convey her darker side. Referring to the earlier development sketches, I thought again about giving her some deformations. At the same time as this, I was also thinking about what the illustration might portray; I had found a nice reference photo of a sitting pose that I could sketch from, with slight adjustments to the posture to make it more interesting, so I started scribbling away.

After a while of trying to figure out what I could do to make the pose my own, I had the illustration's story building in my mind: she's a strong, fearless warrior mage who's just beaten a challenger. Being a cold-hearted, ruthless killer, she's torn the man's head from his shoulders and now holds it out for the viewer to see, daring them to think of challenging her.

I guessed that this might get the point across about her being a darker style of character, so began to play around with a few more ideas; maybe the hand holding the head was in some way deformed, like a demonic hand, granting her super-strength. It seemed too close an idea to the likes of Witchblade, but I liked it nonetheless. Also, for illustration purposes, given the pose and how the hand wouldn't be entirely visible, to hint at it's alternative state might make a nice visual point.

I rode with that idea and altered the position of her left hand, adding to it a sword that I planned to make look fairly bad-ass later on.

I took a day out from the sketch and returned to it to find a few mistakes in need of correction - mostly with the head area. Other than that, the anatomy seemed solid enough.

I used to be quite bad for not taking to the time to fix all mistakes that I spotted - I would just move on and try to wrestle a piece of work into submission. I don't work that way anymore, I take time out at each stage of a project and fix any mistakes as they appear to me. I also seek feedback from peers as often as possible, just to double-check (peer groups that I use regularly are on Facebook, but from having used the Behance WIP feature so often this term, I'll be seeking feedback from class peers too).

I hadn't thought too much about the overall composition of the illustration up until this point - something that would come back to haunt me - but knew that I wanted her to be situated on the left side of the illustration, pointing to the right. For this reason, the original flow of her hair had been heading in the wrong direction, so that was adjusted. While I was doing so, I referred to my earlier hairstyle sketches, playing around with several variations of the long, side-hanging fringe, to see if I could make it work in my favour.

There were a lot of scribbles and discarded sketches for this stage but upon reaching this point, I was pretty happy with my choices so decided to move on.

This is probably my favourite stage of character illustration - dressing them up and getting everything in the right place. It can be very time-consuming, especially as my OCD kicks in and I have to get all the clothing in the right places, and following the correct curvature etc. 

Since I hadn't fully decided on the girl's outfit, I had room to play around a little. I feel like this was a double-edged sword; on the one hand, I had plenty of sketches and ideas to refer to, so a good portion of it was practically figured out already; on the other, I would be filling in the blanks with features that would benefit the composition of the illustration, but might not necessarily work in an actual design sense. I decided to wing it and see what happened.

The torso armour design came straight from my earlier sketches - albeit with slight alterations - while the leg pieces and belt area took quite a few revisions to get the way I wanted them. Plenty of sketching, erasing and re-sketching went into this before I eventually had designs that worked for me. I used as little reference as possible for this, relying on visual memory for 90% of the process.

Once I was happy, I knuckled down and got stuck into the linework. I'm always striving to evolve my skills in lineart, so I take my time to get lineweights and tapers just right, and try to produce smooth lines wherever possible.

I was happy with the end result, so worked on the sword a little (the whole time I'd been working on lineart I'd been thinking about how it might look) and luckily, got a solid Bastard sword design in just a couple of tries. I inked it up and called this stage done for the meantime, posting it online to seek feedback.

22 // Tangents

These images show a slight tangent I went off on, following the Spellsword costume sketches. I was wondering if it might be possible to get some retro-futurism designs into the process, so as to assist the 80's influence.

Heading into C4D, I dabbled with a few ideas - mostly voxel - to see if anything might help me to come up with some ideas, either for costume design, or environments. I made these. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again.

21 // Early Development 03 - Spellsword

I've been quite bad at keeping the blog side of this project updated these past few months, mainly due to family, Uni work and other aspects of life taking up most of my time. I managed to combat this by maintaining a presence on Behance via the WIP posts I frequently made for each section of the project, responding to feedback as it came my way.

At this point in time I've completed the work for the assignment and now it's my intention to produce blog posts that will give insight to my thoughts and developments of each stage of the project. I can still remember a lot of the essential points that I considered while working on these sketches and illustrations, so it shouldn't be too difficult to present detailed accounts of what I was thinking at the time. I'll present a separate blog post for each section of the project, starting with where I left off...

This stage was all about getting some design ideas down fast, to give me something I could refer to later when determining the best elements for the Spellsword character. In my previous post I sketched out a few different appearances that might be interesting for this type of character. I'd felt a strong connection with the leftmost sketch of the four I presented; she seemed to possess a confident, ruthless attitude that I felt would benefit the darker side of a fantasy genre female warrior/mage.

With that in mind, I began these sketches. The hairdo was an important starting point as I feel it's an important element in a character and can really benefit the overall design. I tried out several styles here, bearing in mind that I was also trying to integrate a retro-fantasy/'80's twist on things - hence some rather dubious 'dos.

Short hair was really appealing to me, so I carried that through onto the next sketches, where I dabbled in some torso armour designs for her. Two things that I really want to get more of in my work are high detail and flow, so I'm always thinking of ways to explore this throughout each stage of the design process. I played around with some detailed armour designs, sketching from whatever I could conjure in my mind (I'm working harder at building my visual library these days, so trying to imagine a variety of designs prior to sketching is a big part of my process now, relying less and less on reference material while sketching) and then implemented some flowing cloak/rags that might work well within a composition.

The first torso design shows how I focused more on a symmetrical design, the middle shows an asymmetrical, and the third is a combination of the two. I was torn between which type of design would be more successful.

Also to note, in regards to the 80's influence, I thought I'd feature some beefy shoulder pads in the design to give a slight nod to the era.

Following on from the torso designs, I referred to my inspiration board to get a quick update on elements that were often featured in successful dark-fantasy designs. Kekai Kotaki is a big fan of getting as many spikes, ringlets and fangs/horns as possible on his evil characters, so I made note of this before moving onto the next sketch-fest.

I tried a few different things this time; tearing up the girl's face was first on my list of things to do. I wondered if I could merge a pretty girl with something horrific, that might benefit the dark side of her character and provide some kind of a backstory element, so I played around with exposing parts of her flesh and making spikes protrude from her. I also popped a couple of glyph (or glowing tattoo) designs on her, to see if that might help with the magic part of her character. Neither of these appealed to me, but I carried on implementing them into another torso sketch, just to make sure I gave it a chance.

The exposed flesh and spikes didn't appeal to me as I wanted her to remain pretty, without too much flaw. I felt that there should be another element that could convey her dark nature. In the torso sketch, the glowing green coming from her exposed ribcage is supposed to be some kind of a magic-infused soul spilling forth - a bit like a lich might have - but Kekai has already done that (as have many others) and he did it very well, so I wasn't keen on attempting my own spin on that.

I moved onto getting some leg armour designs down. By this point, I was confident that I would be presenting this character as a strong, sexy warrior with some magical elements most likely applied to her weaponry or armour. I focused on making the armour set more believable and appropriate for the D&D style of artwork, while considering ways that I might be able to evolve the design and add my own angle to it. Again, these sketches came from whatever floated through my mind at the time, with little or no reference used on the way.

Something that had been bothering me was the girl's hair and face from earlier. I wanted her to have slightly more of a generic young-fantasy-heroine look about her, that I could then muck about with to suit my own needs, so I tested out a few new hairdo's and gave her a younger, more pissed-off expression. This time it was the longer, asymmetrical hair style that was catching my eye. I kept that in consideration for the next stage.

20 // Early Development 02 - Spellsword

So it's the same deal as last week, but this time I'm trying to find an appearance for the female character of the trio. I originally mentioned that I'd be doing a Dark Queen type of character, but decided that this was too cliche even for me! Instead, after spending a few hours wandering through the D&D wiki and looking at various character classes, I decided on the Spellsword class. 

I think there's a lot of potential for interesting designs with this type of character, and I intend to explore as many of the options as time will allow me.

Speaking of time, unfortunately I was a little bit shorter of it this week - what with family and other projects needing love also - so I wasn't able to try out quite as many appearances as I would've liked, or get them to the same level of finish as I managed with the Warlock character last week. Having said that though, by the time I'd sketched out the 3rd alternative for the Spellsword girl, I knew I'd found my character. I had a little bit more time to experiment with a fourth, just in case. The sketches are refined enough to get the idea across (rather than the awful mess of scribbles they begin life as) so I'm happy to share them.

On a side note, I spent a little bit of time this week absorbing myself in the goodness of 80's-style design and typography, seeking some inspiration for the next phase of design, where I should hopefully start integrating 80's stylings into my characters. I rattled this together, more as a means of experimentation than anything else, so let's see how it goes from there.

So, next week will be the same thing as before - pre-dev appearance sketches for the third and final character... as yet undetermined.

19 // Early Development - Wizard (or maybe a Warlock)

So I spent the previous week sketching out some ideas from which to jump-start the character design process for the Wizard. This stage is very-very early development, as I really had no idea how I wanted to present the character, hence I began by experimenting with a range of cheesy-fantasy character archetypes to try and settle on the kind of personality I want him to have later on.

I played with quite a few different personalities in my initial sketches; crazy/manic; young and confident; dark and mysterious; nerdy/dorky; old and haggard; young and nervous; hard and serious etc. This was a fairly important stage for me to get a grasp of what might work within the world I'd like this character to be a part of, as my ideas are pretty jumbled at the moment.

As far as genre and inspiration goes, I'm quite into the idea of basing my characters on retro fantasy schematics: D&D presents wizards quite specifically, so this is something I'll be adhering to, while applying some anti-hero/villain twists to the design later and making the character's personality and appearance darker and more disturbed. 

I also want to add some real 80's retro twists to the designs - I watched Tron recently and have big plans for getting neon in there somehow. D&D has always placed great emphasis on magic within their worlds, so maybe I can go crazy with that kind of thing? Besides, my original ideas that I rambled on about in an earlier post mentioned something about magic being out of control in this world, so maybe I should develop this further so as to have an excuse to get as many over the top lighting effects in there as possible? It might lead to some interesting illustrations later on. Then again it might not.

My early ideas for the kind of environments these characters might exist in centre around a dark, kind-of-apocalyptic fantasy setting. Based on this, I get the feeling that the majority of these sketches show characters who wouldn't fit into that kind of setting very well. However, the beardy chap and the old man have some potential; I get a lot of extra ideas for backstory, personality development and outfit designs when I look at them, so I think I'll choose one of them to take through to the next stage.

Another reason that this stage is important for me is that I'm using this project as a means to evolve my art style; I want to be able to consistently produce stylised, original characters, even when using reference as a base. This series of early development sketches should help me to refine my style for later stages.

This week I'll be following similar steps for a Dark Queen (or Female warrior) character. From the experience I've gained here, I should have a bit of an easier time with her, and be able to cut straight to presenting darker designs rather than messing around with typical examples.

18 // Project Inspiration, Reference and Art-Style

Alrighty, so I've warmed up my sketchy skills a little and have given plenty of serious thought to what I want to produce for this project. In this post I'll give a little bit of insight into where my inspiration comes from, the genre I'll be focusing on, and the art style I'll be applying to my own work.

Inspiration

This is one of those times when my past influences come back and inspire me again -  the Dungeons and Dragons style of fantasy art has always appealed to me for it's diverse range of characters and monsters. The older artwork brought with it a real sense of adventure and camaraderie - the essence of the tabletop game -  and is quite recognisable for its retro-fantasy style. Looking at some of the illustrations from the 70's and 80's, I get a real feeling of the time they were created; the style is fresh, bold and expertly hand painted, capturing the innocence of the franchise with it's (now quite) stereotypical fantasy heroes.

I love the whole character-class system they developed with that game (Rangers, Paladins, Rogues, Wizards, Fighters etc) and how today's D&D artwork still holds dear to that schematic, presenting each individual member of a party as an instantly recognisable character class. I've always gotten a real feeling of fun and adventure from the artwork, particularly the action-packed scenes featuring a whole cast of characters facing off against a huge monster. 

The early Conan movies took a similar approach with that style of fantasy, making it available to a wider, more mature audience. The Death Dealer series of novels did this too. Both of these examples have a slightly more mature presentation of the fantasy genre than D&D, though still adhere to the popular character archetypes and storylines.

In today's entertainment, Capcom's Dragons Dogma did a really good job of capturing some of the essence of 80's fantasy, bringing team-based dungeon crawling back to popularity in atmospheric environments. Most notable is the Dark Arisen DLC, which took the setting to even darker depths, with greater beasts to defeat. It is this darker side of the fantasy genre that inspires me the most; dark, atmospheric dungeons; demon monsters and creatures; dark magic; evil wizards etc.

Genre and Reference

For this project, I'll be trying to really push my character design skills. I find that I tend to struggle quite a lot when it comes to outfit designs, therefore I intend to study from Kekai Kotaki's work on Guild Wars 2. He manages to blend traditional and modern fantasy design in lots of interesting ways, creating concepts that have captured my attention since I began studying Computer Arts, so I feel this is a prime opportunity to really study from his work.

What attracts me most to his work is the realism he captures in his designs. Sometimes he blurs the lines between good and evil, which makes me question the character's true allegiance. For instance, in some of his character-based illustrations he presents heroic knights in situations where the underlying narrative seems to suggest they might have some kind of a terrible burden to bear. Other examples show groups of - at first glance - evil natured characters in adventure-styled scenes, much like the aforementioned D&D artwork featuring heroes on quest. To design memorable anti-heroes and anti-villains is something that I'd like to try and implement into my own work.

Of course though, one of Kekai's major talents is simply to produce original, pure-evil fantasy creatures and characters. This creativeness in design is also something I'll be working at.

Along the way there will likely be other artists that inspire me, but I think the important thing for this term is that I don't confuse myself with too many alternatives.

I'll also be researching professional practice, utilising and adapting a workflow that will allow me to create a number of designs in as little time as possible, so as to thoroughly explore every avenue within the character design process.

Art Style

I'll be sticking with my default linework-based style for the duration of this project. I've always found it easier to work in this manner; over the past couple of years I've tried to break out of it and learn digital painting skills without need for lineart, but it just doesn't compute and my work suffers as a result. So I'm determined to continue with my own techniques as they clearly work best for me.

In terms of art style, my own work has generally favoured a semi-realistic approach. For this project though, I'd like to try and mix it up a little. I've always been a big fan of Patrick Brown's style: his character art is a very distinct, quite mature version of cartoony. He presents very dynamic poses in bright, colourful illustrations, packaged together in a crisp colouring technique, with excellent linework. I don't plan on borrowing too heavily from his style, but I will be learning some anatomy-caricature (I don't know how else to describe it) techniques from his work.

The development artwork from the Fable series of games is a great place for me to pick up some guidance for character art and design. The light-hearted, quirky fantasy is full of nice chunky outfit designs, and there's also a thing or two to be learnt from the caricature-style artwork that they use.

Joe Madureira is going to be a major influence on my work for this term, I think. His concept artwork and illustrations for the Darksiders games is amazing to behold, as is his huge comic book art portfolio. He's all about high detail linework and chunky design (two of my favourite things to date) so I'll be on a mission to try and get a shot of that rodeo.

My last major influence for the art style side of things is comic book artist Alvin Lee. He produces some of the nicest hero-portrait sketches I've seen. Fast and loose, he captures expressions well, using great angles and proportions to best present the subject. His style is more realistic than some of my other style influences, so time will tell how my own style evolves from all of these studies.

17 // Dude Sketch

Just realised that I haven't sketched out a fella since... forever.

Here's a dude.

16 // Warming Up the Stylus

Just a quick post to share some of the digi sketches I've been playing with, getting back into the swing of character art. Soon it'll be time to start creating some character designs specifically for this project.

15 // Building My Own Brief - part 1

Over the weekend I had a good think about how to elaborate on my previous post regarding my plan for this term's project. I've already mentioned that I'd like to focus on character design and develop my own visual style along the way, but I didn't go into too much detail about the genre/setting of the world I'll be building upon. This post should pose and answer a few questions relating to that side of things.

First of all, I'll tackle the genre: dark fantasy. Nice. The setting? Post-apocalyptic fantasy universe, where magic-channelling technology, cities and artefacts, once commonplace, are either destroyed or lay scattered throughout the land. While this power-source was once controlled by technology, a catastrophic event of some sort occurred and now it has seeped out, distorting and perverting nature's laws, creating abominations and distorting the geography.

World population has dropped dramatically as a result of the catastrophe; the great cities have crumbled and are now nothing more than ruins that nature has reclaimed. Remnants of the past technology remain, but are often useless, their resources having been depleted.

Some humans still remain, wandering the land and seeking solace - the quest for safe, untainted land, free from this purgatory. Therefore, this project will tell the story of scavenger/travellers; a monster-hunting/looting kind of deal. The rare magi-tech finds are extremely valuable in this setting; the travellers will be skilled enough to be able to dismantle, alter and create weapons, defenses etc from their finds. Magi-tech weaponry can be extremely powerful in this world, capable of allowing the character to face-off against some of the mightier foes.

Also in this world, I want there to be a cult of wizards/necromancers/dark mages who devote themselves to a higher being/demon of some kind. Maybe they were responsible for the catastrophe? Perhaps it was organised, or maybe something went wrong - they were used and betrayed by the devil/deity they worshipped, who maybe sought escape from some imprisonment and used the wizards/dark mages to suit it's own nefarious plan?

That might be a pretty vague and messy pre-vis summary, but I'm still juggling a lot of ideas around in my head at the moment, trying to imagine the characters that might inhabit this world, so as I figure it out a bit more I'll add to this.

My default art style is quite comic-book-y; bold linework; bright colours; exaggerated and stylised characters; special effects etc. This style of output will likely steer the direction of my designs along the way, which is no bad thing as it will keep me happy with the quantity of work I'll be able to produce. 

While I'll be sticking to this style for the majority of my exploratory and illustrative work, one of my intents is to explore some alternative visual styles along the way. For instance, I might adopt more of a Manga approach to some illustrations, or go with digital painting techniques further down the line, if I find myself with enough time to learn some more techniques.

To summarise, this post has definitely created more questions than I thought it might, but I'll have fun trying to figure out some answers to them and continue to evolve this story. In the meantime, I still need to decide what output the story will benefit mostly from; at the moment I'm thinking videogame, but comic book illustration might also be an option.

14 // Latest Inspirations

Here are some images from a few of my favourite artists of late; I've always been more interested in linework driven artwork, and it has been more comfortable for me to get to grips with throughout my education, so I'll be sticking with that for this project.

The following artists all make great use of linework within their art, yet have different styles overall. For the meantime, this will be the benchmark for my own illustrative work.

Tim McBurnie

Jakub Rebelka

Matt Rockefeller

13 // 2nd Term...

For this term's project I plan on focusing on 2D Character Design, with character-based illustrations throughout. I decided on this area as I feel it to be more of a comfort-zone for me; last term I put myself out of my comfort zone by choosing to produce environment art and my grades suffered, so I've got a bit of catch-up to play now.

I'll be sticking to my own style of artwork for this project - which can be seen in the following images - and developing it further throughout the term. There are some aspects of my own style that I enjoy, but feel could definitely benefit from refinement, so that'll be a focus for this project.

In regards to evolving my style, I'll also draw attention to the artists that have inspired me most lately.

As far as genre is concerned, I've yet to decide on that. I'll also come up with world lore, back-story, etc. in order to assist and influence the design process.

Along the way I'll also be continuously studying anatomy and developing my figure drawing skills in order to produce the best drawings I can. I'll also be asking for feedback at regular intervals - seeking advice from Ryan, class members and any communities I'm involved with - to hopefully gain further understanding of my strengths/weaknesses, should I become confused and/or lose my way at all.