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.

Batman: Arkham Origins - ARSENAL

Here's good chance to post a bit more of the exploration process that went into a few pieces of design.
We attempted to infuse the weapon designs with a mixture of the modern, the classic 40s mobster style, and hints of Art Deco and truly make them look and feel like unique, little pieces of Gotham City.

The Skeleton Rifle or Zip Gun - the default goto side arm of every Gotham thug.

Sawn-off shotgun.

 Shotgun explorations, in brackets the ones we picked.

Joker gang - nail gun design and explorations.

Bane's Rocket Launcher

Assault Rifle Explorations - Light, medium and heavy

Sniper Rifle Explorations

SMG explorations

Machine Pistol Explorations

Where Our Forefathers Slumber

Messing about with the smudge, with a slight focus n hard/soft transitions.

Light on Rocks and others

More studies of light.

Light on Plaster and Beaver Skull

Here are parts of my recent efforts to improve my understanding of light, done in series of lunch breaks . Thanks to Mr.Baines for really bringing my attention to that. You can check out some of his way more refined studies here.

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.

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!

White Sand

More work folder cleanup. since I don't have anything new, here's an old sketch I'm still quite fond of.

Neverbears

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

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.

Random Locations

Random eviroment studies of locations from Google Street View, found trough http://www.mapcrunch.com/. I've planed to do one each launch break this week but managed to find time only for 3. Maybe 3 per week is a more realistic number, we shall see.

Square Boat

Here's something done for the Monthly theme over at the Sijun forums. SQUARRRES!!! And many thanks to sparth for starting the rectangular craze :).

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

Skies

Some sky studies from photo reference.

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.

By The Falls

Wish I did more like this one!

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.