Process - Warrior

Hey Frens!

This Process is going to be a pretty detailed one! That might not be everyone’s cup of tea, since it’s longer than usual, but I’ll try to highlight the important parts! And I’m excited for this one because I get to talk a bit about character design.

So let's get to it!

This boy! This very handsome boy! He was one of the first commissions I started working on, but only finished him now.

Work on him started with a pretty detailed briefing, which was pretty cool to work with! Client made a general idea of what they wanted on SoulCalibur VI’s Character creation and wrote notes on what I should take from that and what I could - and should - change, as well as a little mood board of references that could express the general idea they had in mind: a buff man wearing skimpy armor and wielding a scythe. We love to see it.

Here are the briefing pages the client sent! Those are super useful when creating something completely new.

Client hadn’t decided much about the character, except for how they wanted him to look like. So, in case, I came up with a bunch of possible outfits based on combinations of different rpg tropes, like a Knight, Wizard and Barbarian:

The "?" one shows not even I knew what was going on with that guy.

After studying these designs, the client mixed them and made a new version with the parts they liked the most (the highlighted "franken-design"), and I tried to go forward from there. Cleaned up the rough lines, tried adding chains in the arms, as well as play with asymmetry - since this character was supposed to be a rougher guy, using symmetry would communicate an idea of order and stability, which is not what we want.

At this place in the process, I felt tired from the piece. I wasn't noticing mistakes and wasn't able to  take the feedback properly - like me turning the asymmetrical cape that we agreed on into two. I think I was burnt out from this not being what I thought it could be. So I had to take a break from it.

After the break from it, I understood what was bothering me: the overall design wasn’t saying anything. Who is this character? What is their “thing”? Maybe it came from the Soul Calibur creation, or from the client using different designs to approach something they liked, and me just going from there, but there were no unifying elements and no cohesive theme for him.

I tried to take a step back and remembered how we arrived at the design for his codpiece/underwear situation: using the mask from the character creation and adding some pointy ridges so it would bring some visual interest. So I used those ridges as a possible element to tie everything together, and repeated the theme on the mask and on the greaves. Adding them to the other pieces of armor made it look too repetitive, and the design needed some smoother areas for the eye to rest. Midway through it, I suggested we changed the chest straps into possibly a harness that could also have a place for the shoulderpiece to connect. With the ideas approved, it was time to finish the lineart! 

Simply choosing the ridges as an element to tie the design together made it much simpler to make the other parts fit together with a solid color scheme, which was the next part.

Coloring and shading is my absolute favorite moment in the process! Maybe it's because I think I arrived at a good method for approaching it, or maybe because I just like shading in general. And for colors, client wanted dark iron armor with a white cape, and mentioned Darius from League and Vaseraga from Grand Blue as inspirations. I quickly panted his skin and then started looking for and applying the references. You can also see the scythe has returned briefly, but the client didn't really like it, as it felt cramped and asked me to turn that into a halberd. Also did some finer color adjustments, since everything was looking a bit too bright (and the cape was clearly yellow, not white!)

All that was left was some fine tuning, correcting some minor mistakes, adding some light body hair and the previously mentioned halberd.

I got super happy with the results, even though I know it's still not quite what I wanted, but I had to finish it. I think someone once said artists are never finished with a piece, they just have to abandon it at some point, and I felt that. But I guess I chose a pretty good point to do so!

That's it, frens! Let me know if you'd like to ask anything, and I'll try to answer as soon as possible :D