Entry 6: NPC Character work

This blog entry is a little late due to deadlines in other modules as well as this one. For this blog entry I will be presenting the work that I produced for the NPC Mum and Dad characters.

Sticking with the look from Grabbed by the Ghoulies, I drafted up rough colored versions for both parents. The look I was going for was a disgruntled parent who has just woken up to check on disturbances in the house that have woken up their children. Their tired, grumpy, and want to go back to sleep as soon as possible. 

For the dad, I wanted to really go for the tired look. Bags under the eyes, a cheesy shirt they quickly put on, and a pair of mismatched slippers that he slipped on. He's also got a mug of tea in hand to motivate his search. Alongside this criteria I wanted to stick to the general colour palette of blues, green and purple hues that we decided upon within the art bible. I produced 4 variants of the work to get a little variety for him, giving him different styled clothes, weapons, slippers and mugs to play around with. 

For the mother I had a much stronger idea of how I wanted her to look. I looked up online reference for the dressing gown, applied a few colour schemes, a drew them up. I wanted a tired, action mum, ready to beat up any monster on sight. I also followed the same idea that I used for the dad and did variations to elements like the weapons and slippers. 

When these were done I showed them to my team. For the dad they wanted the top half of the thrid design, combined with the bottom half of the first design, but having the cat slippers with a pink colour scheme instead. For the Mum the 1st design was quickly chosen, and with this done I went on to create a concept with both of them in it together. 

This next section explains the process I went through to create this piece.

Step 1

 To start with I drew out the rough poses for where I wanted all the elements to be in the scene. I wanted Mum and Dad next to each other in order to give a sense of unity and defense. I also decided to include the monsters to give a sinister feel to the piece, but also to show what they are actually looking for, hiding behind the door waiting to cause chaos.

I used a general size 13-20 brush with a 74% opacity to work out the basic posing, not worrying too much about the neatness of it all and more about getting the construction lines into the scene.

Step 2

 In the next stage I drew up the rough outlining for the characters, and then neatened them up. Obviously as you can see parts didn't match up so I readjusted and moved the designs around as needed. I also changed the positioning of the monsters, due to the fact I was drawing them purely in black, and the silhouette looked a little off with one sitting on the others head.

For this step I changed to brush to a smaller size of 3-5 with opacity ranging fromk 50 to 84%. This was done in order to get the finer details into the linework. Also putting the characters and monsters lineart on separate layers made it easier to edit and move each part around the concept.

Step 3

Generally happy with this I went on to colour in the scene. I started off with roughly 3-5 selected hues to paint each area in, but then as I went along mixed it up to suit the shading where needed. I also looked at real life objects, like for example with the mum her dressing gown and rolling pin weapon, in order to get their colours correct. I decided the light source would be coming in from the top let, but not too strong so as to completely lose detail in the work. For the door I colour picked from a image reference and played with it from there.

For this scene I used brush sizes ranging from 10-20  for the bigger details and 5-8 for the smaller details. This helped to give me a variety when it came to painting in details for certain areas.

Step 4

 All this step required was to provide a thick outline for the parents. I used a size 8 brush with a solid 100% opacity. I also rubbed out parts of the lines in order to keep the outline shape flowing nicely.

Step 5

For the final stage I added in panels to the top and bottom in order to focus the scene on the parents and monsters. I added shadows to give everything a grounding, added a light colour to the background, and finally added my signature to the artwork to finish it off. 

I've since uploaded it to my AGD group page and have had it approved for our presentation on Tuesday.

For the next blog entry I will show the work that I have done so far on the Overlord character, who rules over the playable character monsters in the game.