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. 

Research Sub R2 (vehicle design)

presentation sheet with orthographic and some original thumbnails

This was the original thumbnail sketch I took and blew up to start filling up spaces. I added railings for stability once the sub returned to the main ship for docking. I also added many, many lights and windows. 

I told myself that if I wanted to have a cleaner painting, I needed to create a good line drawing. I still hate making a super clean line drawing since it always look stiff afterwards but I kept the lines as clean as possible before going back and filling in a flat value for the silhouette. 

From there, the purple background wasn't dark enough for me to see any loose paint lines so I filled in with a nearly black. (It's actually a really desaturated dark blue.)

And from there, once I filled in a solid single value for silhouette purposes, I started actually painting in the value differences while keeping things very desaturated and monochromatic to avoid going too crazy on colors early. I found at times, I tend to pick too many colors at once and it gets crazy quick. 

Once the solid values were in place, I started painting in shadow and light. After that, I started using the  soft light  blending mode for the brush and adding in colors to see what looked nice together. I wanted to keep yellow as a primary so I tried various oranges and purples but the purple I had picked looked odd for a submarine color scheme. I threw on the purple and then started playing with the Color Balance layer adjustment to find a good mix I wanted. I went towards a warm magenta orange-yellow balance. Once that was in place, I painted in the highlights and eventually wear and dirt/rust. 

It was a nice change of pace to actually draw the cleaner line, rather than my usual loose sketch - paint over method. I also separated the layers more than I would usually, something I started implementing during the #mermay art challenge drawings. It definitely helped keep things within the silhouette and also allowed me to keep each blending mode on its own which let me keep things organized in a different but helpful way. Particularly the soft light layer painting could be kept away from the overlays and the color dodge and extra highlights could be on their own. 

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). 

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.