Batman: Arkham Origins - Early Characters

And for the last post in the series, here are some initial character explorations, based on a very early design of the game that we later changed. Initially we considered the thugs being more of a minor supervillain in the making, that you get to evolve in to something more significant as you play, but later that change in order to have better alignment with the core title and various other reasons. I still feel quite fond of those, a simple, but fun bunch of mobster ideas to play with. Make sure to check Mr Manuel Dischinger's gallery to see how the thug designs evolved and were brought to quite spectacular completion.

Twenty Watches, Vast Vin, Manfred Cast and co.

Firecracker Phil variations and evolution into Fuse. 

Mailman, Spam, Jolt and Insulator

The various variants of Vast Vin.

The Shrub - Javelin Bearer of East Pass

Here's pencil rendering exercise doubling as a concept for one of my personal little game projects, codename d The Shrub. I hope I'll be able to put up a little page about it at some point. Meanwhile I decided to stop keeping all this side project work for myself and share it here. She's a Javelin Bearer from East Pass, a mountain city state and one of two warring factions in between which my main character is caught. More bits and snippets about East Pass, West Port and The Shrub to follow soon.

TO MEGABRO

Here's a little present I did form my brother!

Smoke Hammer

Experimenting with quicker, simple technique in order to fit some paining back in to my scarce and tight free time.

Figures In Line 02

More of those one is from photo the rest invented. I was lazy here again, It's about time I move on the more detailed sketches. I hope the next batch will be more refined.

The Dentist

Since I haven't been up to much painting or drawing lately here's one from the vast archives of thing awaiting to be finished.This one has been there since 2009 and apparently is never going to get more polished or finished than that. I still quite like the idea so I might do something more based on it in the future.

Figures In Line

Here's a bit more, decided to switch to something simple first until I'm totally comfortable with line sketching digitally(I have the feeling I might need a bigger tablet for that). The third one is from reference photo the others totally random. I need to go into suggesting a bit more subtle details and using finer lines I think.

Line Exercises

I've decided that's about time to take some steps to improving my line drawing skills, especially getting used to do it with the the tablet. So here are some quick experiments on top of simple thumbnail sketches I did to a different degree of success. Switching back to line after years of mostly painting and quick sketchy thumbnails is way harder than I expected, and makes me thing about going back to some serious figure studies for a while. More of those to come soon!

Neverbears

Never go hunting alone in the forest for bears! They're not what they seem, the're not what you're told...

Medicine Woman

Initial sketch

I've been always fascinated by early human history(Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age) and I've been plying around with different ideas based around similar topics, with the ultimate goal of creating a short illustrated alternate history of one such tribe, in an invented alternate world...someday. Here's a random character based on an old thumbnail.

Orthodox Police - Light Priests

Here are some more old [neo]martyr concepts/thumbnails.

Those are the three branches of the priest class of the Orthodox police in their light to medium variants.

The Apostle - a sort of a battle priest missionary type character using a range of light weapons. Adept at dealing with hostile situations.

The Holy Smoker - bearing a range of large incense burners and staves and the heavy robes of a higher order.

The Proclamator - Voice of the law of the church.

Five Helmets

Here are five quickly rendered in B/W helmets, part of a series of 100 that I never finished. Mostly because I planed to render all of them in this way. Will probably post the rest of them at some point in whatever state they're in when I have time to assemble them :). The designs are completely random, just an exercise.

Centrifuge Outcasts Head Mechanic

This one is a paint over an old sketch I did for the [neo]martyr project ages ago, I decided to paint it over recently, but the overall lack of perspective and depth to the portrait finally managed to put me off polishing it more. Nevertheless a good exercise that helped me realise some things that I was lacking and need to study more. Also I think that In my attempts to fix problems with the initial sketch I lost a lot of the character and attitude I had going on there.

Robot Got Back

Here's a bot I've spend too much time on. Time to move on.

You can download a vid showing some process steps here:

Robot Got Back WIP Vid

Captain of the Night Watch

And exercise trying to speed up my procedure when painting character. Trying hard not to overdo things and keep them quick, balanced, and spontaneous. Still not fast enough, took me couple of hours to do most of it and ages to decide on what final touches to put.

The Fifth Horseman

Launch break sketch. Post title should explain everything.

Trailing The Wall

Here's a small sketch I did some time ago and forgot to post, or more likely postponed in the hopes that it could turn into a more finished illustration.

Sneige Portrait

detail:

A Semi-stylized portrait of my amazing wife Snezhana aka. Sneige check her works on sneige.com or her blog orangethyme.blogspot.com !

100 Heads

Here's another 100 things exercise, heads this time. Most of them really bad attempts some not so bad. The important thing learned tons of thing, thing's that I do wrong and many I need to improve or concentrate more on. Here's a list of some.

- Increase format, tiny moleskin is nice quick and comfortable, but the lack of "resolution" messes your proportions and often the sense of scale. Makes you miss things.

- Pay more attention to perspective in faces, try and exaggerate it when needed. Yes it's there especially when the viewer is very close to the subject.

- Pay more attention to subtleties and detail, something the larger format allows.

- Fill in my visual dictionary with greater variety of expressions, not only extremes, but ones expressing more subtle feelings too.

- Do more studies from life and reference. Those are never enough. And are especially useful after s loon series you've tried to pull out of your head.

- There's maybe more.

note: some heads might be missing, because done on separate sheets or SBs if I manage to track those down and scan them I'll add them here

Orthodox Police - Temple Guardian

Over painted a bit an old concept I did for a personal project codenamed Martyr or [neo]martyr some time ago. The project is frozen and I still have tones of half finished concepts from it that I need to process and post so stay tuned for more in near future.