I was struck with inexplicable inspiration in a bank parking lot the other day – mage hats. Mage hats would be my next design challenge. I like the games that I do these challenges for, and I mostly like the appearances of characters and the world. It's more for the challenge of designing for a world I had nothing to do with. Why mage hats? I think the mage hats have become a bit of a running joke with not only the fans, but the Dragon Age team as well. I remember listening to a podcast where some of the creators joked about making the hats better for DA2 since they had apparently received a lot of comments on the hat designs! I started with research. I typed in “Dragon Age” and “mage hats” and was instantly rewarded with results like “Are there any mage hats that don’t look like total crap?” with entire forums devoted to how people get around the mage hats – some posters said that their mages always ended up in plate to avoid the hats, while others suggested using a very specific hat to be found from the circle or to use studded light helmets ... or nothing. The seriousness and outright helpful attitudes with which this concern was addressed was entertaining and in a weird way heart-warming. Such intense passion for helping other players’ mages not look silly! These hats are serious business. Below is an image I found on tumblr, but the original poster seems to have deleted the initial post. However, it's still being reblogged. It has over a thousand notes on it! So what is it about the mage hats? Though I do think they improved a lot in Dragon Age 2 (well ... mostly), fans are still having a bit of a field day. I think part of it is that mages are traditionally seen with the witch hat or some kind of hood. The concept artists apparently decided against that and have been explored other options.
So it'll be fun. Like the these designs, I will try to avoid, for the most part, the often-seen wizard, witch, mage, or magic hats. I suspect I'll find it is rather difficult, but that is the point! Step one will be the same as with the Fenris armors design challenge. I’ll draw several items, then release them on my social media for voting and critique. After that I’ll take the winning designs and ideate some more designs. I leave you with this not-very-impressed Morrigan, from Dragon Age: Origins, wearing the Apprentice cowl. (Source: dragonage wikia)
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Now that all the moving from country to country thing is settled, I've had time to get back into a schedule. Spidersilk is updating three times a week and commissions have opened! Below is a commission for six costumes for a D&D character by northernvehemence. The character is a bard who raps, and the world is a bit steampunk. I was pretty excited by this one! Very fun to do. I've also been able to do a fair amount of personal illustrations. My recent one is a romantic fantasy image. I really wanted to do this one because I don't find the pose all that romantic yet I have seen it in a lot of places! I have this thing about drawing cliche poses -- in fantasy, pin-ups, whatever. Otherwise my "couple" illustrations are a bit weird, and they are always doing something like reading or eating for some reason. Anyway, here's the sketch. The final version will appear in the illustration section of my portfolio. WIP Since this image was fairly successful (even with this pose!) with its flat coloring and dusty palette, I might try out something similar for the elusive Dragon Age fan art I keep trying to do. My Dragon Age II is somewhere over the ocean on a boat being shipped from Japan to home, but I could always make up a new Hawke. I have about six of them anyway!
Here are some ideations for Prentice’s sacrifice dagger, as mentioned in the previous post. In Spidersilk, mages who cannot harness the full natural energy of magic and only the basic primal energy of blood are called “syphons.” There are all sorts of rules and limitations to syphon magic, but that’s not the point here. Prentice is such a mage, and he usually uses his own blood. It is why he carries a small knife or dagger. At first I decided to try a new sort of dagger than the one he usually has in the comic. His last dagger looked more like some kind of combat knife. He will use the dagger as a weapon but he prefers to use it only for magic, which is why he’s usually otherwise armed. Since it has such a specialized use, I decided it’d probably be ornamental, maybe pricey, and likely have spellwork or runes engraved right into it. He always has it and it clearly means a lot to him, though why hasn’t been revealed yet. I thought I should play up making it as distinctive as possible.
He’s got his summoning down to an exact art, able to form a summoning portal with two gestures, throwing blood from his arm and the knife. The knife should have some capabilities of holding onto his blood to facilitate a fairly even distribution when he does this – that’s when I started ornamenting the blade with small indentations rather than what could be ornamental spell support. You can see that on the last blade. I don’t like any of these blades as is for Prentice’s purposes, but I can see some of them getting reworked for the final design. As I noted in the previous blog entry, I am working on concepts other than characters at the moment. I am nearing a time when I will need to draw weapons more readily, and given that those can be expensive, I need to set what weapons each character uses to avoid that "I buy new weapons for every fight" sort of look. After I looked at the Hobbit's concept art book (for the first movie), I was inspired at how much care was taken with retaining individuality with the dwarves in several aspects -- clothes, colors, weapons, etc. For Spidersilk, I want to make the main characters' weapons (if any) to be distinct and match their styles and combat preferences. For example, Prentice is thorough, if not a bit reckless and messy. He's never worried about not having enough weapons, so he seems to care little for them -- he really just needs his dagger and he can and will rely on his magic. But I've been drawing him with a sword and staff combination lately, and that staff changes every time I draw it! Unless his staff is so cheap it breaks every time he uses it, I think he should have a recognizable one. So here we have some staff ideations for Prentice: While ideating I alternately considered his personality and style and others I just tried to run with it, seeking new directions in my designs. Below I'll give a quick thought about the staffs.
Staff one looks like a strange combination of Sailor Saturn's glaive and something from Dragon Age. I think ... no. Staff two is a very stylized version of what I usually draw Prentice with, but it isn't weaponlike enough for him. The gem end is too complicated and it is lost in its own details. Staff three I fear is not really a mage weapon. At this point I began to realize Prentice didn't really need a staff, but I kept drawing. I really like the weapon end of it, but the mage focus end is subtle. Staff four is based on this tree I saw while in New Zealand. This is less of a melee weapon and is only for focus/ magic. While I love this tree, I think this design would need another rework to suit Prentice's melee combat tendencies. Staff five looks more like a weapon and less like a staff, though I did include talismans in the shape and detail. It has variety, but since he tends to use two weapons anyway, such a versatile staff is probably not a good idea for him. After this... I think it is his sacrifice dagger I should focus on next time! I will revisit the staff designs I liked best and ideate more based on those select few. I have completed my move and am settling in. I will begin the WIP blog once more! My current running side-projects include more Dragon Age fan art, a fan comic about SKYRIM, as well as various commissions.
In order to flesh out my portfolio, I do think it's important now to spend more time documenting processes on drawing props, environments, and architecture. To that end, I am going to draw a new staff for Prentice (of my comic Spidersilk), since it tends to be different whenever I draw him with one! This is his latest, but I will be looking at all of his staff images for ideas, as well as generating quite a few new ones! I in general want to keep personal details out of the WIP blog, but I am moving out of Japan and those preparations have been keeping me busy. A lot of things to sort, clean, send. Many people to say goodbye to. Events. Just ... a lot of things! I have been able to update the comic twice per week but have not been able to do many other projects. I forgot what it was like to move so far away!
WIPs will continue after I have arrived home, in about one more month. I generally do longer stories in a page by page fashion, and the one-shots or three to four panel comics are a bit lost on me. Still, I want to try, and chose to do this as a short comic.
I did a sketch and was not pleased. I thought about other comics of the sort I'd seen and realized my mistake. The expressions would need to be exaggerated; they needed to be very different from panel to panel for the story anyway. I'm thinking panel two will be the most fun, but without the contrast of one and three, it won't have any meaning. I am going to go with a generic Hawke based on my playthroughs rather than the default Hawke. I'm giving him robes from Dragon Age: Origins, though because they are some of my favorites. I missed those robes in DAII. In other news, I have another idea for yet another one of these. While I do not want these to become a series (my main comic is enough work!), I am glad to be getting these ideas as I play one of my favorite games. Here's a sketch of panel three with a mysterious WTF floating over Varric's head. That's more of a note for me on follower expressions than it is on what will actually be said. Aaaand inspiration has struck! I was working on comic pages all weekend and I decided I needed to take a break. I picked up on my Dragon Age playthrough (for I always have a "current" playthrough).
Something happened that was so hilarious I fell over laughing. I know I said I'd draw a normal picture, and maybe I will, but I will have to get this silly comic out of my head. Especially since I've always wanted to do a Dragon Age fan comic and never was able to! I shall draw it tomorrow. It has to do with playing on the dialogue that can happen if you are playing as messed-up as I am -- I keep forgetting what sort of character this guy is supposed to be, and I think he may have several personalities. When I do fan art it is usually a copy of an image so that I can pick up ideas or techniques from the artist, or it is a redesign of someone's clothes or armor. That's one of the ways I got into comics in the first place -- as a child, I used to trace Betty and Veronica from Archie Comics and then redesign their outfits. Comics and fashion go way back for me!
I have only done illustrations of my own composition for other webcomic artists, though this hasn't happened very often. I want to try this again to challenge myself. I am going to work up some ideas for concept. Because my concept isn't that clear yet, I won't discuss it. I will say that it will be for Dragon Age. Last, I will share some bizarre fan art I made for a friend. We make absurd fan art for each other, and this masterpiece came to mind after reading her community challenge blog with the theme of "heroic." Things quickly got silly. I secretly blame Lord of the Rings for the strange monster. (Read her comic here, a sci-fi romance called Bio-Revelation.) I love designing characters and have made many over my decade of making webcomics. I have put a lot of effort into my world-building of Spidersilk. It occurred to me some months ago that though I'd considered many things about the cultures,I hadn't really decided on the clothing worn in different cultures throughout the world of Spidersilk. While it may never come into play in the comic, I thought it was a wonderful exercise and I can incorporate elements of this into the wardrobes of the characters of this culture. My aim: To create the costumes for the Saaliet'ssan Process notes: I wanted to consider the people who made the clothes, including what technologies they might've had. With a degree in Fashion Design, it's a bit easier and I cut out a lot of research ... just some quick check-ups! First I looked up clothes online from many cultures, from Russia to Inuit to Celtic to ... well, you get the idea. I absorbed the colors and looked up more images of the ones that struck me so I could see the common elements or themes carried throughout the different pieces of clothing. It was a bit much, but soon I was brimming with inspiration. Then I decided to just draw. The first attempt was a mess because I hadn't focused enough. It was eclectic and did not seem practical for the climate, so I narrowed the focus and tried again. While I liked this a lot, I didn't feel it was a fit. I reflected on what I'd done right so that I could improve on the next attempt. I narrowed my focus and took inspiration from a few key sources. I liked the drape and color of the outfits found in a picture I saw of Masai women's clothing. I liked the type of clothes and the cut used in traditional Russian clothing that my research turned up.
I made sure to work on cohesion in the designs. I used the triad colors of red, blue, and yellow as I was inspired by traditional Sami clothing. The final piece includes surface design achievable by techniques such as batik, bound resist, tie dye, and other dye techniques. Low-water dye baths turn up some great mottled effects, and I tried to replicate that in the color version of this sketch. Many surface design techniques can be used to add adornment when the wearer does not have the time or money for fine embroidery and jewels. The fabric would be simple and cool for the warm climate of Saaliet. The bright colors are the only thing carried over from their distant homeland, which is cold and covered in show nearly half of the year. All garments have loose drape, allowing for ease of sizing and wearability by anyone. The sketch is below, but the final version is in my portfolio here. |
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