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.
