The Domovoi, a Twine game by Kevin Snow, has been released. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be posting my art and sketches from the game. If you haven't checked it out yet, please go take a look -- it's free and short!
Concept artwork for Nikolai's hut.
This was actually one of the more straightforward illustrations. I don't even have records of alternate sketches -- I mostly referenced the peasant hut included with the original mood board.
Concept artwork for the hut's progression. Here's where it gets a little more interesting.
In Matul Remrit, the progress of the story is marked by the roster of dwarf names which precede every season. As the fortress enters its downward spiral, the roster of the dead (which has the appearance of a carved stone tablet) begins to fracture and eventually crumble.
The establishing shot of the hut serves a similar purpose in The Domovoi. As the story progresses, the winter storm mounts and grows in ferocity. There are actually two possible outcomes here -- the storm reaches its fiercest if the player makes a certain choice near the end, or abates if the player chooses the outcome that the storyteller favors.
In terms of the artwork, I tried to show the progression through close attention to detail; as the weather worsens, snow accumulates on the foreground objects and tree limbs sag and break. Technically the sky shouldn't remain visible during this kind of blizzard, but I wanted to reflect the mood of the story in the darkening cloud formations (which eventually take on the shape of a hammer).
I altered a few things for the final -- the hut is now enclosed by additional trees, and their limbs no longer break as the snow piles up. Aside from that, little else to note. Painting these was a lot of fun, but as with the spider, it took some careful layer management to get the details right in every shot.
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