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Character Armor Design
One of the characters I play in a text rpg recently got some new abilities, and I wanted to make a design for it. Basically it allows him to summon magical armor, so I got to have a lot of fun with the design.
I knew I wanted to loosely base the armors design on ancient Greek armor. I found this blog post to be really useful: Ancient weapons and armor: A fascinating journey from the Greeks to the Romans
For the base I used a similar silhouette to hoplite tank armor, which has the breastplate, greaves to guard the shins, and the skirt. The shield was based on a hoplon shield, but I saw a few designs that had the cut-out spaces on either side that I thought made for an interesting design. I think it was originally used as a space for spears when holding the shield up, but decided to keep it anyway rather than a full circle for the design. I used the xiphos sword as the base for the magical flame sword he’s able to summon, it’s not anything overly complicated or ornate but I felt like that was more fitting for the character anyway.
I tried a couple different helmet designs, looking in particular at Corinthian and attic helmets, but didn’t like how they looked. One friend suggested I do a laurel instead, and after drawing it I felt like it was much more fitting and looked way better.
Hollow Knight Illustration
While I’ve been working on my illustration for the Hallowhome Zine I’m part of, (should be releasing next month!), I decided to take the other illustration idea I’d had for it and draw it for fun.
For those that don’t know there’s a character in the game called the maskmaker. They’ll switch what mask they wear when you visit them, so my idea for the illustration was to draw them picking between which mask to wear next.
Overall I’m really happy with how it turned out. One thing I’ve wanted to improve at and made sure to focus on was having a stronger contrast between values.
Looking back at one of my older pieces, you can tell when making the image black and white that the image on the left blurs a lot more into a sheet of grey versus the image on the right. With the image on the right there’s multiple points of brighter shades and darker shades, especially in places like the face of the maskmaker having the contrast between really dark and light values makes it stand out more. Whereas with the image on the left, if I took out that one bright ponytail off the helmet, it’d be hard to tell what to even focus on (and also means peoples eye will be drawn to the ponytail rather than any other thing I would actually want them to focus on, like the sword, or the helmet, or making the character stand out from the background).
Now that I know to pay more attention to values when making an illustration, I’m able to look back in my older work and see where I could have pushed for stronger contrast to make the image more interesting.
Character Lineup: Scarlet Hollow
I’ve been playing a lot of Scarlet Hollow recently and decided to make a design for the main character of each Scarlet Hollow playthrough I’ve done so far. I don’t want to add spoilers here but I went in detail on each playthrough in this Tumblr post.
I also had another design that I didn’t end up adding to the Scarlet Hollow character design lineup, but decided to finish a drawing of anyway. I wasn’t sure about the background at first but the more I messed around with it the more I enjoyed it.
Art Style Study: Generator Rex
I worked on another art style study with my character Jericho and had a lot of fun with it! I was practicing replicating the style of the show Generator Rex by the studio Man of Action. It was nice to go back to a show I enjoyed from my childhood and ended up feeling really nostalgic. I feel like a lot of shows from this era kinda fell into this similar semi-realistic cartoon style, it also reminds me of The Legend of Korra and Voltron by Studio Mir; (also the 2011 ThunderCats reboot does anyone else remember that show existing or am I alone in this)
Hallowhome Zine
I’ve finished up my illustrations for the second Hallowhome Zine! I can’t show them here yet since the zine doesn’t come out until February, but you can check out their Carrd here and keep an eye out for it! I’ll also be sharing links on my social media once it’s released.
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