Scout Astor Hummel - prop and character design

Kappack (backpack prop) - Ortho

Scout Astor Hummel - character design illustration 

initial sketch of Astor Hummel character design 

Redesign & paint of Queen Crystallos & Diana Lang

In telling myself I needed to draw more orthos, I revisited some old character designs and selected out some props. The props I knew I wanted to draw were from the Visual Development for Live Action course I took while at AAU. During the course, there wasn't really a prop design requirement; just 4 characters (hero, sidekick, villain, creature) , vehicle and environment. 

The first prop I tackled was Queen Crystallos' scepter. 

I knew there was gonna be quite a few details I had to figure out while I was drawing the orthos, but it was a worthwhile challenge. 

From there, I decided to revisit the old character design of the Queen and redraw and redesign the character. The old painting, while for live action, was pretty blotchy in the paint, and it bugged me for years. 

For the redesign/draw/paint, I went and tried a line based approach and added a lot more detail to her dress, and completely redesigned her crown. The old one looked rusted, which wasn't what I wanted,  and bone-like, which while does work for villains, was also not what I wanted. 

After I completed the Queen, I told myself I might as well redesign/draw/paint all of the remaining characters and create orthos for their props as well. 

Thus, the heroine, Warrior Diana Lang. 

Her style ended up being something very different from the style I went with for the Queen. (I intend to go back and repaint the Queen in the same style as the Warrior.) 

The retractable shield gauntlet changed quite a bit from the original design. I actually couldn't recall what the original one looked like and this version was a happy accident while I was painting the new character painting. 

So far, I really like the style I went with for Diana Lang, and her shield gauntlet. Onto her sword! 

Vehicle and character design pairing

As a challenge prompt from a Facebook artists' group, I designed a character and vehicle. It was definitely something new where I had to consciously make something look damaged, as the prompt involved an escapee and their get away vehicle. 

For the character design, I wanted to challenge myself with making an armored character, and began sketching helmet designs. Once I found a couple I liked, I began working on the full character silhouette. 

The initial character sheet's layout started pretty much as above, with the character's illustration on the side. 

Eventually, I decided the back light beam was too much and took it off, and began working on the character's lighting. 

After taking away the line drawing underneath, and cleaning up some areas, I changed the layout after receiving some construct critiques on the model portion of the sheet, and hard edge indications. 

During these edits and changes, I was also working on the vehicle design along side the character, progressing at the same time. 

 There were tons of thumbs I went through as I was figuring out what to use as a design.

My idea was to have a small ship, one that wouldn't take a large crew to fly, especially since the character was escaping, and most likely had little to no time to get a crew.  Design wise, I also wanted the ship to hold some similarities to the character. The two tails on the back were part of that design. 

The damages I envisioned were from ramming into objects during the escape, with bullet holes from people trying to stop the character from escaping.  The main section that had the bullet holes was the cockpit area, as the guns were aimed at the character. Another area I thought about was the crew area, where the smaller windows were, but the windows were too small and might have made the holes unreadable. 

I then decided that the piece where the smaller windows were was too messy so I brought the paint back and thought about indents above that section of the ship. However, in the end, it didn't make sense with the shape of the ship, and I couldn't think of a logical way for the damage to end up there. 

Similarly, I scaled down some of the other damages on the ship, and cleaned up the orthographic drawing. 

Towards the end of this challenge, I caught myself more on the lack of hard edges when I was painting, which was good, now that I could catch myself on it. Going forward, I definitely need to use hard edges more, or at least, while I'm painting, jump back and forth from hard edges and soft. 

Dragon Cave, Dragon creature sheet

Dragon creature design as part of a monthly challenge from Character Design Challenge's Facebook page. 

The challenge itself requires a full body image, rather than the illustration version I have as the first image but I wanted to use this challenge as an experiment with matte painting. As a result, I painted two images, one for an experiment with matte painting, the other for the challenge. 

Designing a dragon, specifically a western dragon, was a new route for me. Typically when I draw dragons, they're of an eastern influence and usually lack the wings of a western dragon. 

It was pretty fun to look at a bunch of animal influences to create a look for the dragon. 

Some animals I looked at were snapping turtles, lizards, komodo dragons, bats, and sharks.

Once I did get the design in place, I sketched up a composition and began adding value and lighting, before placing various textures and images on top.

I definitely wanted the dragon to look scary so a low key palette with sharp contrasts was what I had in mind.

During the painting process, I kept adding more shadows so I could increase the contrast and give the appearance of the dragon emerging from shadow, with the light casted from the fire. 

After completing the illustration, I moved onto the character (creature) design sheet.

I took the sketch from the illustration and built upon it, to save me some time in the sketching.

Unlike the illustration, where I put grayscale values before the images and textures, for this I went with color first before textures. 

I had to remind myself during the color stage to not go full render as I still have textures to add. Once those textures were mostly in, I did paint overs on those textures to help mess with the body and features.

Since my plan was to make this a character (creature) design sheet, I needed details and callouts. So I began sketching out an ortho of the head and then finally the wings. I decided to keep the focus on the dragon, so I took out the flat colors I had for the callouts and kept the sketches somewhat loose. 

All in all, it was a fun challenge and lesson with matte painting and creature (dragon) design. I got to try my hand at two things in one painting (two if you count the sheet and illustration as separates). 

Sparrow and Sparrow's Room

Sparrow's bedroom design

Sparrow's character design

Sketch using the SketchUp model as a base. 

Sketch of Sparrow's character design, before color

For the room design, I created the room shape (floor) first as a square before adding in the small closet space to break the stiffness (squareness) of the room design. 

The plan for this room design was to include the plants, mug and dragon sculpture I designed a while back. They're not as defined in the room painting as they were on their stand-alone prop sheet. 

It definitely was an fun experiment to paint a room in isometric. Fun enough that I decided to deign another room in isometric later.

I really went for loose sketching for the character design since I realized I start too quickly on details at times, loosing the line of action. 

I think I can call it a success in moving in the right direction since I was able to keep the sketch and design loose while only defining parts like the eyes, some of the folds and feet. The hands were kept a bit loose and simple, so going forward, I want to bring back some details into them. 

School Hall Fight

I wanted to retry my creative skills in designing a school hall environment painting again. The previous piece was interesting, story wise, where school kids were fighting against a robotic janitor gone rogue. There were a lot of fun details in that piece, but style wise, it really failed to catch the eye. Color choice played a part in there as well since that  piece was nearly all gray scale with only hints of blue and red. 

And so, came the idea of two super humans flying through the hall, now abandoned due to their fight. 

Before the final version, I realized how linear the flow seemed and I wanted to fix that.

Since I had planned for the girl to show off some supernatural abilities, it was a great way for me to draw the eye around the piece, and explain why papers were flying around in the air, haha.

I ultimately decided to get rid of the line work and go full painterly style, and cleaned up from there. 

I really do enjoy how it turned out stylistically and definitely wouldn't mind coming back to this style or even building on it. 

Swamp - House, Witch Doc and Gator

In repainting an older painting, I wanted to create asset pages for the house and characters. 

I wanted to properly design the house in the painting. 

Gator character design

Witch Doctor sketch, from this year's Inktober

I got to really try painting in a different style I usually would for both the characters and the house.

Additionally, I really got to design characters with animal influences without many the animal influence too apparent, which I really wanted to do in the original painting.