The Benefits of Technology

Character design is one of my favorite areas of game design.  I am working with trying to draw concept art for my characters in various RPG campaigns.  This character is from the game Exalted, and is an Abyssal Dusk Caste samurai, who lost her arm in a battle and had a robotic prosthetic replacement.  Although Abyssals are typically associated with death and they do sometimes use necrotech (patching things up and making machines out of corpse parts), I wanted to make her arm more mechanical.  My mind drew a blank in how to depict an arm as clearly robotic (although I can picture things when not drawing), and my indecision shows, unfortunately, in how the lines of the segments don't seem to line up properly.    I do enjoy the effect that illustrator had on my drawing, as it seems much more comic-like, which is what I was going for.

Contemplating My Drawing Skills/Deficiencies

I wanted to juxtapose my conceptual renditions with drawing directly from observation. The one up top and on bottom are works I did from my imagination (though the one on top is a little skewed due to my poor photography skills).  As for the one in the middle, you can see that I have a much clearer grasp of depicting something I can see.  I placed them like this to try to highlight the differences.  I need to figure out what gaps in my mind that I have when drawing from my mind rather than simply recording what I see.

Dissonance

I wanted to demonstrate why I like to keep things simple, so to do that, I have one of the most over-the-top examples of poor use of colors(I designed it specifically for this purpose).  Warning, if you are epileptic, get migraines, or have any other issues with flashing lights, do not click the link below.

Seizure Ball

Working with objects

An important influence to what I am trying to do is the more visceral tangibility of the physical world around me.  This image was a project I did for my visual literacy class, which was to make a book cover by photgraphing found objects and implementing them into the title and imagery.  It kind of goes with what I was saying before about how I can work with things I can see, but have difficulty projecting my own unique ideas into concrete expression.

Working with colors

Color is another area that I need to work with.  While my favorite color is indigo, I tried it in the past and had difficulty generating an aesthetically pleasing color scheme.  Eventually, I landed on working with a sort of dark gold/brown color.  I want to restrict my colors and be either mono- or bichromatic, but I provided this image I made from when I was in high school to demonstrate the unity I want to evoke.  Personally, I actually prefer limiting color selection to only two to three colors, as I think it becomes more iconic and sticks in people minds, but if I could find a way to do it with broader range, that might be good too.

Drawing Styles

I'm working on trying to develop an art style for the game.  I wanted to try to draw some of my own artwork for it, but I have difficulty projecting images from my head onto paper.  I can draw that which I see, but somehow converting abstract thoughts into concrete imagery is difficult.  The images above are from my one illustration class, and they are images of Tony Jaa from Ong Bak.  I sampled it in gestural, hatching, and tonal using pencil.  It shows use of lines and value with an interesting kinetic tension.