Game Characters - The Survivor, The Bandit and OhMyGodThatThingBitMe

I am currently working on a new adventure game, and for that I had to seriously start developing the final look of the characters. Since most of them come in three different levels of equipment, I went and drew the final designs and all of their needed modifications for each level. Further on, I will take this exact designs, scan them, turn them into digital outlines with Adobe Illustrator's autotrace feature, then simply paint the insides. The actual game is currently in early development, but once the pictures are coloured I will be able to implement them straight in the game and things will look quite awesome.

The tale of The Red Eskimo

The cold never got to him. Whatever harsh and frozen landscape he was exploring, he never looked for any warmth. All the power was inside. He was the warmth.

He was aware of how gifted he was... and cursed. There was no need for the peculiar Red Eskimo to seek warmth, but everyone else would risk their life for such thing. Not to mention that in these harsh lands, some entities of the cold would expect way more than just hug him...

He could sense them. Shuffles in the snow. Subtle exhausted snorts. A desperate desire for heat.

Whatever will happen in these moments, he must keep being The Warmth of this world... or The Warmth will be lost for ever.

Across the green snow

After the red Eskimo was done, I started drawing the majestic snowy landscape. Based on a quick sketch, I outlined all of the basic shapes in Illustrator, paying attention to how the layers are structured. For instance, each lighter inside of the mountain shapes is placed in a layer above their respective mountains. Once I got the basic shapes covered, it looked like the following:

It still had the black outline that is not going to be present in the final piece, and most of the shapes were the same colour because of how fast I jotted them down. At this point, the focus was to find an interesting colour tone and make the shapes distinct from one another. After several iterations, it came to this:

With this, I already managed to get a lot of the final piece done. The colours were balanced and the black strokes were removed, while still leaving quite enough contrast. I decided for the mountains to be a greenish turquoise, so the colours would better contrast with the red Eskimo. For the next step, A bit of texture will be added in the mix.

character development - the red eskimo

For the current concept art project, I picked a snowy theme and decided to do an Eskimo character. It passed through several variations, but ultimately I decided upon this one. The walking pose and the ready spear bring the design to life.

After inking the character and taking a photo with the webcam, I flipped it back to its original position (the one below), and started outlining the shapes in adobe illustrator. Once that was done, I frantically slapped basic colours on the shapes and started iterating, trying to figure out a better pallete. Speaking of which, in the end I used the Palleton website to pick five shades of red and coloured the little dude based on that.

After this, I will focus on adding some volume to the shapes by colouring over. And then... the environment...

Sketches in the train station

Here are some quick sketches made in Newcastle Central Station. For a challenge, I skipped drawing columns and banisters, focusing solely on sketching people. Also, since I knew how elusive these little humans can be, I did all of the sketches directly in pen, so I wouldn't spend any time erasing and outlining again. I had limited time to lock in a position before the targets resumed moving, so there's not much focus into detailed features. The overall experience was awesome, and I feel like the observing part was more important than what happened in the pages...

mini-project: final mask expressions

For the mask mini-project, I digitally drew and coloured the masks and the transitions between them, all based on these 3 face expressions:

After more drawing and coloring, the final result was this bad boy:

Mask development - 12 frame personality

For the Masks mini-project, I started a first attempt of the animation directly on paper, by drawing three facial expressions (one underneath the other), then drawing the transitions on the right.

How it was done:

-I drew the key facial expressions at the beginning of each row: excited, worried, angry.

-I then drew nine empty faces next to them, three on each row.

-If  "excited" is frame 1 and "worried" is frame 5, I went to frame 3 and figured out the middle position between the two emotions.

-I then made frame 2 to be the transition between "excited" and "so-so", and frame 4 the one between "so-so" and "worried"...

-I then went and did the same stuff (last two steps) between the "worried" and "angry" expressions.

This test made me figure out the core structure of how to do animate like this, and I'm now ready to start animating a new mask, digitally...