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.