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.
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