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.

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.

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.

Skies

Some sky studies from photo reference.

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

100 Arms

Some thumbnails for a challenge I was doing with some friends. I've gotten a bit rusty in that department, so those were really useful to remind me where I have to improve. I even got a couple not half as bad as the rest :P.

Sun Bathed Towers

Here are to speed from today, tried to hit the 20-30 min time limit with those and almost did it, one is for 30 and the other 35. I just couldn't stop :P.

Planetside Patrol

A quick B&W sketch with some curves for flavor. I should try to suggest more with some colors on top for that time, but I still lack the confidence I guess.

Alchemy experiments

Here are some experiments I did some time ago with trowing some quick shades(PShop) on top of b/w mess quickly done in Alchemy. I was planning to do more of those but finally ended with just two. Maybe some day, I'll play with this process some more.

Flyer ONE

A quick flier for today. Maybe more tomorrow.

Forest of the Pierced Stones

And here's finally the unremarkable first post on my blog I've being postponing for ages. Some mystique forest thumbnails, with strange monoliths hiding in between the trees. Started like another set of those popular lumpy stone mound environments, but accidentally they got equipped with a few branches here and there an voila we've got a strange looking forest of towering trees.