The Domovoi: The Assault

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!

In one of the story's final branches, the soldier -- incensed by the domovoi's refusal of his offer -- savagely beats him with a hammer. It's one of the most harrowing and disturbing scenes in the game, in which the themes of violence and abuse are brought to the forefront.

Concept artwork. The commission notes called for a sequence of illustrations showing the effects of the violence on the domovoi. Kevin originally suggested a focus around the mouth and beard, but I also tried a variant showing more of the shoulders and head (albeit mostly covered in shadow). Ultimately we decided to go with the close focus.

I wanted the violence to have a sense of physical impact, so I focused on the domovoi's motion as much as the soldier's brutality. I admit that I had a lot of trepidation going into this set, but despite the sobering subject matter, it ended up being very interesting to work out visually -- I spent a lot of time trying to coordinate details between each "frame" of the series.

The Domovoi: The Soldier

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 soldier is another pivotal character in The Domovoi, and his scene contains the final choice of the game. The relationship between the soldier and his creator is fairly complex, and we wanted to play up the themes of similarities and contrasts in the visuals. The composition directly parallels the scenes with the storyteller, but the lighting is distinctly colder, the atmosphere tenser and more threatening.

Concept artwork. I tried a couple of gestures for the hands, but ultimately went with the "knuckled down" pose seen in the color test -- a suggestion of the violence to come. For the gun, Kevin recommended the M1895 Nagant revolver, a common firearm during the revolution. (It's turned the wrong way in the sketch!)

Final artwork. As with the previous illustration, I used a photo reference here... those are actually my hands! Unlike the storyteller (whose garments were nondescript), the soldier's clothing more clearly suggests his profession.

The soldier lights his cigarette. We nearly missed this one, but a helpful Platformer alerted us that we needed a drawing for this part of the story. The cigarette is a symbolic link to the domovoi's master, and establishes a connection between those two figures.

The soldier offers the gun. Not used to drawing firearms, I ended up using a reference photo from online. It was an interesting challenge to mentally turn it to the right perspective... hopefully it passes inspection!

We're getting close to the end (in more ways than one). Daily Domovoi should wrap up sometime this weekend.

The Domovoi: The Storyteller

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 storyteller is probably one of the most important characters in The Domovoi; all the other characters, after all, are her invention. The commission, though, simply called for her hands resting upon a table. The intent was to show the scene from the player's point of view and give a sense of participation from the very beginning. The player has been invited into the storyteller's home to share a glass of vodka and help her craft her latest tale.

Once again, Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land was one of the direct inspirations for this illustration. Specifically, I had the game's tavern screen in mind. I wanted to capture the same kind of warm, convivial air -- a deliberate contrast to the cold, drab color palette used in most of the other illustrations.

Concept artwork for the storyteller. I played around with the idea of showing different moods through the gestures of the hand. In the end, though, we only went with one variation.

Final. Through most of the game, the storyteller's hands are shown serenely clasped upon the table. I took a photo reference to help me get the hands right.

It might be a little difficult to tell, but there's a tablecloth on the surface. I struggled for a bit with trying to draw a hand-stitched pattern on the tablecloth, but I couldn't quite get it to read convincingly. At Kevin's suggestion, I settled for just drawing a few folds and seams.

Final. This version appears if the storyteller is insulted by your suggestions.

The Domovoi: The Oven

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!

Not much special to note about the oven. I referenced the style directly from the Russian oven page on Wikipedia, and would expand upon it later for the second title illustration. Also, watching The Godfather on TV was strangely helpful as I painted the latter two variants.

Concept artwork. The composition here is just a straightforward close-up of the main oven pit. I also tried to mimic the subdued earth tones in my TotFL references in the color test.

Final oven design. Although the empty oven is never shown in the final game, I sort of like the way it looks -- it has a desolate, abandoned quality to it.

A branch burning in the oven pit. This is the main illustration encountered in the course of the story.

The blazing oven. I'm not very experienced at painting fire, so I loosened up and tried more for expression than photo-realism.

The domovoi's remains. Finding references for this one was very unsettling.

The Domovoi: The Hut

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.

The Domovoi: The Spider

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!

Around the time that I began work on The Domovoi last summer, I was also playing through a PS2 RPG called Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land. It was a solid little dungeon crawler with a ton of neat ideas (some that actually influenced this year's Might and Magic X: Legacy), but one of the things that struck me the most was the wonderful art style. The game takes place in a ruined kingdom wracked by a recent supernatural calamity, and I thought that the visuals (particularly the hand-painted shop interiors) did a great job of capturing a quiet atmosphere of desolation and despair. There's a ghostly sort of quality to the artwork that I thought would be a good fit for The Domovoi as well.

Interesting side note: Katsuya Terada, the character designer and one of the principal artists on TotFL, is better known for the illustration work he did for The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. His Zelda artwork influenced Kevin and George Kavallines in the Kou update for Matul Remrit.

Anyway, I liked TotFL a lot and began referencing it almost as much as period works by Russian artists. I don't think I was successful in capturing a hand-painted look, but I did draw a lot of inspiration from the muted, washed-out color palette and the moody lighting. I think the influence began to show most strongly around when I started drawing the spider.

Concept artwork for the spider, which diverged a lot from the original commission notes (which simply called for spider eyes and a web in the darkness). In one of our early conversations, Kevin talked about how The Domovoi was, in a way, a critique and subversion of the way choices are usually presented in games. This immediately put me in mind of Bioware (probably the industry's biggest offender when it comes to so-called "false choices"), which led to me trying to draw the spider using one of the typical "conversation cameras" from their later games:

(Okay, technically it's a KotOR 2 screenshot -- and stolen from one of the game's best LPs no less -- but all things considered I prefer having an Obsidian example sitting here.)

The final illustration.

I'm still a little bit unsure about how well the perspective reads in the composition. The thought would be that the "camera" would be set very close to the spider (who might be on some kind of ledge), and the rest of the elements are some distance behind her. I suppose she ended up looking a little big, but luckily Kevin didn't think it was a problem.

It took me a few tries to figure out the spider. It was my intention to make her look a bit mysterious, but not sinister or threatening -- she's only trying to look out for her brood, after all. I also tried to pose her forelimbs in what I hoped could be suggestive of someone trying to make a deal.

One of the many variations of the spider illustration.

A few things to note about the spider illustration: it's one of the more reactive sequences in the story, and it incorporates a lot of scenic details from the text (for instance, you can see the "unskilled cut" in the windowsill that gave her access). I ended up drawing more variations for the different possible states than any other illustration in The Domovoi:

• The web can be small, large, or broken, depending on whether or not the domovoi permits the spider to stay.
• The spider can be in the frame or gone, also depending on the above.
• The window can be intact or shattered, depending on the progress within the story.

It was sometimes a bit challenging keeping my Photoshop layers straight here, and Kevin and I had a minor panic when we realized we were missing a few states, but overall I learned a lot from managing all of these pieces.

The Domovoi: Iconic Towel

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 red corner -- a small devotional space prepared in traditional Eastern Orthodox homes -- is an important location in the story. Like the narrator notes, it ties into themes of patriarchal power and religion, which is also emphasized by the iconic towel depicting the domovoi's master.

The Sick Man, a beautiful painting by Vasili Maximov that also happens to grace the Wikipedia page for icon corners. This was one of the primary references I used for the towel illustration, and probably also influenced my close attention to the wood grain of the walls.

Having little background on icon towels, Kevin provided me with a ton of great references. The style here is really interesting to draw.

A portrait by Abram Arkhipov, a Russian painter of the late 19th / early 20th centuries. I used this as primary reference for the domovoi's master. I also looked at some of Arkhipov's other works (particularly The Mask Shop) both to get a better sense of peasant life and to have some more visual references of period interiors.

Initial concept art for the iconic towel, including the overall composition and details of the master portrait. I wanted to use a sort of underlighting to give the towel an unsettling, isolated look (like something you'd have to examine in a Silent Hill game). I also wanted to give the master's portrait the crossed eyes that the text describes, but sadly I think it got a little lost in the final illustration.

An unused version of the final towel illustration that displays a full bust of the master. It was pretty obvious that it would be hard to distinguish the details here at the final web size, so I decided to focus on the master's face in the revision.

The final version of the towel. His eyes are slightly crossed here, which is probably a bit easier to see in the full-size image rather than the in-game size.

The towel transformed by the domovoi.

Originally I don't think we were going to include some of these variation illustrations, but after reading the first drafts, I thought they might be too fun to pass up. I specifically tried to draw some of the distortions described in the original draft, but I had a little bit of trouble hitting the mark. Kudos to Kevin, who ran with my illustration and tweaked the text in future scripts to match the picture I had drawn. (Did I mention that this was an incredible collaboration?)

My favorite details here are the creepy little faces that appear in the wall. The idea occurred to me while drawing the wood grain for the original version, so I decided to go with it and plant them in there.

The "soaring eagle" towel that the soldier displays in one of the possible endings.

Kevin told me that Lenin images like these were actually fairly common at the time -- in fact, some of them are a lot more heroically exaggerated than the one I drew here.

Though the portrait and border are a bit elaborate, I deliberately made the fringe much simpler to contrast against the master's towel.

Some of my favorite details in these pictures get a little lost up top, so I wanted to show them here. It was a lot of fun to draw these.

The perspective on the portrait is a little bit forced because I wanted it to be visible. It's probably also not a good idea to keep plants near candles... but then again, the care required here might be seen as an expression of great devotion.

The face of doom. You get this in one of the secret endings if you collect all the stars.