The Christmas holidays are over, moving on to the final stage of the specialism project and BA2a, the art tests. In these next four weeks, we will be doing two art tests, each one two weeks long, a practise test, and an official art test given by a designer from a games company. For the practise art test I am doing the 2D character concept art, my requirement task is:
For the newest instalment of the Monkey Island game franchise (Monkey Island: Lost Cove) I have to create a shopkeeper character that lives in an sunken underwater temple. I don’t know how they get customers but my character is surprisingly happy with the situation he/she is in. This game has a mechanic that lets the character switch between daytime and twilight form I have to design and present both their normal and twilight state.
I am asked to create:
1. A model Sheet
2. A character sheet
3. A concept painting
To begin with I looked into the Monkey Island franchise and the company that make them (Telltale Games) and some artwork moodboards to show the style they use for their games, for the monkey island series I found they used very painterly art work, this does help give the unrealistic body proportions that many of the characters have such as the tiny hands and feet.
I looked into one of Telltale's more popular games 'The Walking Dead' which is an episodic storytelling game based on the comic series. The art style used here is cell shaded, which shows the line art to give off more of a comic book theme to the characters rather than the painterly style of artwork used in MI. At this point I had ultimately decided to choose to draw my artwork with Cell Shading style to match the current Telltale Games artwork.
Next up, I looked at Tales from the Borderlands, this was to get some inspiration towards drawing the style and understanding the line art better.
After that, I found some images of my favourite Telltale game 'The Wolf Among Us' based off the comic Fables. I decided to focus on this game as my main art style to create, so while I was drawing out my work, I had to game on in the background to get a better understanding of the characters art in game. The game also helped me come up with some ideas for the different forms due to the main characters ability to transform into a werewolf.
While in the end I ended up abandoning this art style, I did briefly look into the game 'Jojo's Bizarre Adventures: Eye Of Heaven'. I noticed that it had a similar cell shading style to the Telltale games, I thought about maybe branching off from the Telltale side of artwork and following this one to create my work, but returned to wolf among us because of the fact that if I apply for a job at Telltale, they will want to see I can draw in their art style. When looking back on my work, I think I may have added some of this style into my pieces.
Once the research was out the way I started on coming up with ideas for my underwater temple shopkeeper, so to get the ball rolling, I threw some basic blockouts together.
Next up choosing eight of my favourite blockouts and slimming them down to look more human like.
After that comes refining them into a good and understandable shape, next I had planned to pick a few of these images to continue on to give more detail, but changed my plans a bit.
Instead of going straight on to detail, I came up with the idea that the twilight form is some kind of spirit that possesses the character's shadow, causing them to transform. so I looked at various sea beasts and creatures that could be used as spirits.
Once I had created my shadow possessed characters, I choose my favourite 3 to work on in more detail, with feedback from fellow critic's I choose number's 3, 5, and 6 to work on.
Now using images of the chosen creatures, I went about drawing what the characters would look like, I really liked the idea of a sea monkey being the main shadow spirit, mainly due to the cheap fact that the game is called monkey island.
before coming up with various character faces and bodies, I decided to use a basic pose to draw out the various clothes that an underwater shopkeeper might wear, from a sea merchant's apron to scuba gear.
Once I had the clothes down it was time to give them bodies and a face. I mostly looked at LeChuck's crew for they anatomy layout, ranging from fat and plumpy to tall and skinny, thinking about what kind of person would their body and clothes tell, when it came down to the final two, I had a tough choice choosing between the kid pirate captain, and the slow looking skinny old man. In the end I came up with a unique back story for the kid captain and choose him as my character.
Once I had chosen the kid captain and the clothes for him to wear, I began with the character sheet, coming up with a back story so I could get a full understanding of what type of character I was creating.
His back story is that he once was a 40 something year old pirate captain, who after being infected by the sea spirit curse, has been turned into a kid. Now the the spirit possesses's his shadow during the day, watching him, and causes him to turn into a sea monkey type creature at night. After meeting with a shaman who will remove the curse for a hefty price, the kid opens the shop to make money as fast as he can, by any means necessary, swindling, pick pocketing, e.t.c.
To start, I began with the lineart, showing various facial expressions and some full body shots, as well as a little skit with him running away from LeChuck after stealing all his treasure.
Here I've given my character basic colour layers, I decided to give him blonde hair because I've noticed in various series, Blonde hair boys always seem to be mischievous in some way, I wanted to give my character a design that makes him look like a con artist.
Refining the final part of the character sheet in my cell shaded art style, adding various details to light and shadow layers then fiddling around with the levels setting to make the shadows more darker, while also trying to give it that comic book theme.
Once the character sheet was finished I moved onto the model sheet, I did three different sheet forms, A normal form with the coat on, one without the coat on, and his twilight form. For his first twilight form, I looked mainly at images of sea monkeys, trying to shift away from my darker doodles that where shown in the silhouettes, what I ended up with was something that looked a little like a pokemon.
So I returned to have another go at the twilight form, and after a little chat with the tutors, came up with a form that would sell more, basically make the arms into tentacles, and rip the trousers and shirt in the shirtless sheet area to show the effect this transformation has on him.
Like with the character sheet, I gave him a basic colour layer to start, looking at the sea monkey pictures, I gave his twilight form skin a dark gold colour. Keeping his hairstyle the same and raising the neck from the first iteration to support the head a bit better.
Finalised character sheets of three different playable forms, like last time attempting to create a cell shaded style art. I used various textures on the clothes to bring try and match the wolf among us colouring, for the twilight form I added more shadows to the clothes and skin to give the impression that the character swims underwater while in the twilight form, so the clothes would be more wet and damp.
Moving on to the final part of the art test, I started on the concept piece, I decided I would do a piece of my character picking up a picture of his normal form, while in his twilight form. When I was drawing this a thought about how certain characters lose conscience when they undergo a transformation, and are left with primal instincts to hunt and survive, I hope to get across the idea that the beast is seeing his other self and trying to remember who he is.
Before moving onto the colour layer, with crit from fellow students, I moved the right tentacle off the arm and darkened some of the lineart a bit to make various parts of the coat stand out.
Now in this part added the colour layers, and getting basic background textures from the games and fiddling with the hue/saturation and merging together. I decided to add more to this piece by adding a faint silhouette of the main twilight form in the reflection of the picture.
The end result of the concept piece and the art test, adding the colour and texture layers on, then adding more to the background silhouette of my monster, before adding a few soft lines over the top to clearly show that it is behind a glass frame.
With this project, I have taken another step into understanding of what is expected in the games art industry, I know I can improve on the speed and detail of my work with more drawings. Ultimately I feel as thought my final piece could use some more work, however the whole point of this art test is to see how fast you can create the work you are given. I know that if and when I revisit the painting I can get it to look more like it's a picture and you can see the twilight form reflection better.
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