2015 Figure Sketches

Yes, another long stretch of inactivity -- work, life, and health issues ended up taking up most of 2015.

As consolation, here are the figure studies I managed to do. As usual, all the references are from Hong Ly's characterdesigns.com resource.

Links below -- NSFW for artistic nudity. I don't know what happened to #3.

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A Bell is Tolling

Celestial

Figure practice

Reference

Squires

Almost every year, I resolve to do a better job of sketching regularly, only to taper off miserably within a matter of weeks.

Well, it's time to try again!

Here are some sketches of the squires from Final Fantasy Tactics (yes, starting at the very beginning), along with monsters from the game stuffed in the margins. Pretty fun to get back into sketching again, though I think I spent a little too long on this page.

Beneath Floes

Sorry for the long absence! I just wanted to mention that Beneath Floes came out earlier this week!

Beneath Floes is a work of short interactive fiction by Kevin Snow focusing on Inuit history and folklore. From Bravemule:

Qikiqtaaluk, 1962. The sun falls below the horizon and won't return for months. You wander the broken shoreline, wary of your mother's stories about the qalupalik. Fish woman, stealer of wayward children: she dwells beneath the ice.

We're joined this time by Priscilla White, who's supplied beautiful scoring and sound design for the whole story. I also wanted to mention Mike LeMieux's gorgeous title design, which makes the title screen look a lot better than it actually is!

Last but not least, we also collaborated closely with Pinnguaq, a Nunavut-based game studio that has provided invaluable feedback during the creation process and will be working on an upcoming Inuktitut localization.

If you enjoyed The Domovoi, or have an interest in folklore, please consider taking a look. It's short and free! You can find it at Bravemule or on itch. There's also an ongoing (and already successful) Kickstarter for the localization.

MM1: Maia and Blige

More characters from my Might and Magic I party. Sorry about the poor scan quality.

The first sketch is of my dwarven cleric Maia (named after the daughter of Atlas from Greek mythology). I specifically wanted to give her an unusual appearance, so I basically jumped forward a few games and used Might and Magic 3 for inspiration; her bizarre headpiece and slender stature are meant to be reminiscent of Terran dwarves. I also referenced Katsuya Terada for many other details of her costume; I particularly wanted to suggest connections to the game's sci-fi underpinnings, so Terada's industrial-influenced designs seemed like a great fit. Somehow she also wound up with Terra Branford's tights.

The gnome Blige was my party's robber; he's named for an NPC from Demon's Souls. (Pretty much all of my early parties have a Souls namesake tucked in there.) Most of the inspiration for his costume actually came from the second Black Adder series, which I happened to be watching at the time.

Here are their character sheets from the end of the game. I forgot to check these before drawing them, so I messed up a lot of details. I drew Maia in splint mail rather than chain, and Blige is completely missing his shield. Whoops.

MM1: Hargrimm and Rebecca

A couple of sketches of characters from my Might and Magic 1 party: Hargrimm the Knight (named after a character from Planescape: Torment) and Rebecca the Paladin (named after a starter cleric from World of Xeen and later sorceress in Heroes 1 and 2).

The Might and Magic games are pretty much my favorite series in gaming. I've been slowly playing through the whole thing, and I'd really like to draw all of my parties.

Here's how they look in-game!

Kitska: Hutsul Concepts

Hey guys, sorry for the long break!

Today I wanted to post a couple of concept sketches I've been working on for Kistka, a tabletop adventure game based on Ukrainian folklore and pysanky (traditional decorated eggs). The project is a collaboration with my friends Brian Belida and Kevin Snow, and I'm really excited to be part of it.

Players in Kistka take on the role of wandering Hutsul magicians, crafting magical pysanky to help renew the land and stave off incursions from evil spirits and monsters. We're still early on in the concept phase, but one of the things that immediately grabbed my attention were the Hutsuls themselves, who have an incredibly rich and visually fascinating culture. I still have a lot more research ahead of me, but here's a few early character sketches.

Painting practice based on a fantastic photo that Brian found of an old Hutsul gentleman.

I still feel a bit like I'm shaking off the rust, but it was fun getting back into the swing of things. I wanted to try to get a sense for traditional Hutsul clothing, particularly the intricate patterns and embroidery.

A few more pencil sketches based on traditional Hutsul costumes. One of Brian's ideas was to give the characters oversized kistkas, which -- combined with the magician idea -- pretty much translated into staffs.

Page of character concepts based on various Hutsul photographs and paintings (with a few liberties taken here and there, too).

Elizabeth

The Domovoi: Miscellany

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!

Just one last post on The Domovoi, I promise. Here are the various odds and ends that didn't fit in anywhere else, but thought might be interesting enough to show.

Opening Screen

 

The opening screen is one of the favorite things about The Domovoi. Not only do I think the end result turned out great, but the process of creating it was a testament to the strength of our collaboration. It was a cascade of good ideas that solved a specific design challenge and improved the final game.

In the original build, Kevin presented the title illustration and folktale epigraph on a single page before leading into the story proper. The folktale was intended to introduce the concept of the domovoi to an audience that might be unfamiliar with Slavic legends. The illustration, of course, was meant to show the domovoi and lead directly into the main narrative.

The problem, though, was that a lot of playtesters became confused about the relationship between the epigraph and the main story -- some thought that the latter was a continuation of the former. Kevin played around with the text to make the transition clearer, even to the point of considering a change to the storyline's opening line ("I have a tale for you friend..."). Neither of us were really happy with that idea.

I thought about it for a bit and suggested separating the epigraph entirely from the title and beginning of the main storyline -- present each on its own page, just like the opening of a book. I could even put a few simple graphical elements (I was originally thinking of little drawings of some of the household objects) on the epigraph page.

Kevin loved the idea immediately and had a fantastic suggestion of his own -- the epigraph illustration should be an animated candle flame, and it should change color after the story has looped back to the beginning (to indicate change and hopefully entice the player to try another round). We both knew that we had just hit on something really cool.

Candles

 

I don't have any animation training, so making these was a fun little challenge. Kevin pointed me to Zac Gorman's great comic work as a reference for the type of low-frame, high-impact animation he had in mind.

Anyway, these are all of the candles I ended up making. Personally I think the early screw-ups are kind of funny, but they helped Kevin and me narrow things down to the type of style that we wanted. Even as we got close to a final, though, we ran into a couple of nitpicky little pixel issues that had to be squashed lest the epigraph look like a Geocities page. (Edit: Which, ironically, is kind of what it looks like in the preview that Blogger generated up above. Oh well!)

The alternate candle was originally supposed to be blue, but the purple end of the spectrum worked a little bit better. I was listening to a lot of Castlevania music at the time, which somehow helped.

Logo

 Actually, I don't have too much to say about the logo. Kevin asked for a typeface that resembled Soviet constructivist fonts, and as it happens, I was reading Gene Wolfe's The Land Across at the time. I thought the cover font was perfect and tried to adapt it for The Domovoi.

I have very little experience with logo design or creation, but luckily the style made it a bit easier for me (I ended up making everything out of rectangle shapes in Photoshop). I tried a few variations with weathering effects applied to the letters, but Kevin and I both preferred the simplicity of the original.

Unused Title Screen

When Kevin and I were first discussing the title illustrations, I had an idea for an Ivan Bilibin-esque partial borders around each of the images. I gave the idea a test run on the candle illustration, but we never ended up using it.

Although the border version looks alright on its own, unfortunately it didn't look quite as good against the black background of the webpage. The borders looked like they were floating off in space, entirely disconnected from the scene they were enclosing. Still, it's at least worth posting.

Thanks

I just wanted to mention again how great it was to work with Kevin on this project, and also how happy we are that so many people enjoyed the final game. Hopefully these posts have been an interesting look at how the artwork for the game was created. Thanks for reading!

The Domovoi: Titles

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!

The Candle

The candle scene was the first title screen that I painted and, in some ways, still the most satisfying. Kevin and I both really liked the composition right from the original concept sketch, and the final allowed me to develop a lot of the details that I had been practicing throughout the whole project.

There was one thing that gave us a brief panic, though: the bed. I had included it reflexively in the original concept sketch, but it turns out that a bed of this sort would have been -- at best -- a sort of luxury item for a man of the master's social standing. Most peasants would have simply slept on sheets or blankets atop the oven or fireplace. Fortunately, Kevin did some additional research and found enough mentions of peasant beds that we both felt comfortable with leaving it in.

Influence: The paintings of 17th-century Dutch artist Godfried Schalcken, renowned for his candlelight scenes.

The Bench

I knew from the start that we had to have a picture of the domovoi on his master's bench, but towards the end, I got the idea to combine it with a view of the oven pit -- a grim foreshadowing of one of the domovoi's possible fates.

I really, really like how this one turned out overall. This is the most complete shot of the hut's interior that I ever illustrated, and it was a lot of fun to gradually build up the scene and add in all the little household details. The only thing that slightly bugs me is the domovoi's frame -- he seems a little too bulky here compared to the other title screens.

Influence: Once again, Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land. The dull color palette, lighting scheme, and clutter of objects are directly inspired by the blacksmith's shop screen.

The Threshold

This was by far the most difficult of the main title screens, and for awhile I felt really uncertain about it. I've since come to peace with it, but there's no question that it was challenging for me at the time.

Part of it had to do with the composition itself. There were a lot of positioning and detail problems that I had to solve -- I fretted over the placement of the hut and whether or not it matched with previous depictions in the in-game illustrations; I worried about the placement and distance of the trees; I feared that the domovoi's expression would be unreadable at that size; I fought with the color palette and lighting.

I was also going through a bit of personal turbulence at the time. I had just finished up a stressful year of work only to have oral surgery over the holiday break. While recovering from that, I was also starting to come down with pre-launch anxiety -- the prospect of the The Domovoi being put in front of a wider audience was suddenly becoming terrifyingly close, and that made the third title seem all the more important and final. So naturally I became hyper-critical of every little detail in the picture, and probably got really annoying to any human being within reach.

Influence: The illustrations of Russian folktale artist Ivan Bilibin, whose depictions of nature are both beautiful and foreboding.

The Portal

I mentioned above that I eventually came to peace with the third title screen, probably because I transferred a lot of my opprobrium to the portal page illustration. It's my own fault though -- I rushed a little bit on this one. A lot of the details are similar to those from the third title, only executed a lot more loosely.

My main reference here was one of the title concept drawings that I included in the previous post, but I was disappointed that I couldn't capture quite the same mood in the final portal illustration. Still, some of the details came out alright.

One more shot of the big lug for the road. Thanks for reading!

The Domovoi: Title Concepts

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!

One of the unique things about The Domovoi is that there are actually three separate scripts, each one a slight variation of the main narrative that focuses on a different theme. The more drafts that Kevin sent me, the more fascinated I became by the idea. Eventually I suggested that the game should have three different title screens -- just like the text, a random one would be loaded on each playthrough.

It turned out to be a really good decision. I had been saving the title illustration for last partly because I couldn't decide on a single composition that would encapsulate the domovoi, but now I had three chances to try to get it right. Additionally, Kevin began working on his fantastic folktale introductions around the same time that I began work on the titles, so I drew a lot of inspiration directly from those.

In the first folktale that Kevin wrote, a domovoi strangles an intruder to death. I was immediately captivated and began drawing "our" domovoi choking people for about a solid week.

I love Kevin's folktale introductions; they're some of my favorite passages in the game. To me, they brilliantly capture the darkness and bizarre humor of Slavic folklore.

This is one of my favorite domovoi drawings from the whole project. I eventually used this as the source for the portal illustration, but I was disappointed that I couldn't capture the same mood and expression.

Concept for the first title illustration. Again, I was inspired by the first folktale -- the old couple laying awake in bed terrified made me think of a domovoi lurking in the shadows.

Kevin loved this one when I sent it to him and suggested that the candle could be seen as a symbol of the domovoi's departed master. Not only did that help me clarify the mood of the drawing, but it also established the themes of yearning and abandonment that connect the three title illustrations.

Compositions for the domovoi sitting on his master's bench, which we used for the second title illustration. Even though they're quick sketches, it's really interesting to compare these against the bench illustration I drew way back during the character concept phase. Not only did my technique change, but my ideas about the domovoi and his world had substantially more time to percolate in my head.

Compositions for the final title illustration. I had wanted to do a picture reminiscent of Ivan Bilibin's beautiful wilderness illustrations, which naturally led to the concept of the domovoi on the threshold. Around this time, Kevin also sent me a fantastic series of blog posts on the cinematography of The Incredibles, which made me think very carefully about how I set up the elements in each sketch.

We were kind of torn on which one of these to use. Kevin recommended the top one because the mood was more consistent with the other titles, but I salvaged pieces of the lower one for the portal illustration.

The Domovoi: The Window

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!

The window is the final illustration from the main narrative of The Domovoi. It's a very calm, very quiet sort of drawing (a much-needed contrast to the violence that precedes it), but it also alludes to the transformation that has been wrought upon the domovoi.

First concept artwork, and proof that first ideas sometimes aren't the best. My first mental image was of the bruised and battered domovoi silhouetted in the light cast by the window, but I got more and more uncomfortable as I drew the sketch (even more so than when I actually drew the assault series). Kevin seconded my unease -- I guess we were both uncertain about the possible connotations of this portrayal of the domovoi. In the end, we made the right choice and left him out of the frame.

A second concept sketch, in which I played around with a low-angle shot.

The final illustration, in which I tried for the atmosphere and lighting of the first concept sketch with the low angle of the second. I think this was my fastest turnaround in the whole project; I'm unreasonably proud of how quickly I painted that bucket.

Two detail notes on this one. The spiderweb seen to the right of the window will be intact or torn depending on choices made previously in the story. I also screwed up on the floor, which was originally supposed to be dirt. I guess I was so used to painting wood grain by this point that I stuck in floorboards without even thinking about it. Luckily, Kevin liked it and changed his script to accommodate my gaffe... sorry and thanks!