A friend of mine does comics related to games she's playing when she's not hard at work with her original comic series. I've always wanted to do such a thing, make a few comics about games since I enjoy reading them. I never had a very good idea, and fan art can be quite taxing. Now that I'm doing a consistent original fantasy series, it wasn't a smart idea to take much time from it.
However ... I was talking with that friend about something that'd happened in my recent playthrough of SKYRIM -- so first, a story. I have the Hearthfire DLC, and immediately built a house and adopted two children, one of whom immediately adopted a nasty, loud skeever. The thing grossed me out and I read somewhere that the kids wouldn't care if you got rid of it, even if you killed it right in front of them. I finally worked up the guts to do so, hid in my alchemy tower, pulled out my bow, and took aim. Please note my stealth is always insanely high. Bullseye! But ... the kid fired out of the chair, yelled that he hated me, and ran away. My other child did the same when I approached her. They both ran away yelling curses. I was distraught -- "I was told they wouldn't care!!" In any case, I left the house and came back hoping it would clear up in time. By default, one of the children ran up to me and asked me to play tag. So I said yes, relieved they were over the skeever thing. As I ran after one of them they shouted, "Go away I hate you!!" It was so pathetic I just restarted and have to deal with the skeever even now. My friend and I began imagining this and other happenings through the Dragonborn husband's eyes. My Dragonborn married Farkus, from the Companions. You know, being married to the Dragonborn may not always be as exciting as you would think, especially when he may not be all that epic.... And let's be honest about the hilarity of SKYRIM glitches. The armor dummy walks around the top floor of my house every time the Dragonborn comes in through the 2nd floor door. Does that hurt gameplay? No. Is it scary? Quite. Did I put goofy mismatched clothes on the armor dummy to teach it a lesson? Maybe. And thus "Diary of the Dragonborn's Husband" was concocted. I've been thinking about it for some time and have revisited the idea, so I think I've got something worth attending to! The initial sketches were simple, with a line or two from Farkus' diary concerning some event that'd happened, with intentional misunderstandings of the Dragonborn's reactions (since he's supposed to be heroic). I want to change it from that somewhat, though I do want it to be in a diary format. My first task will be to come up with a basic layout for each entry, or page. I'll post those ideas later, but for now, here are some WIPs from the initial idea. Immediately below are some notes on the Dragonborn's appearance, and at bottom is a sketch of a diary entry.
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As I said in the previous post, I like the load screens of Dragon Age II quite a bit. (I don’t know if they are different on PC; when I looked for images, I found a couple I had never seen while playing on PS3.) Here is an example of one of the load screen images. I tried to keep my illustration trial as simple as possible, allowing for the smallest amount of detail in the face and also the chainmail. The picture above has more linework, but I wanted to rely on silhouette ... or at least try it. A lot of my character illustrations are detail heavy, so it was difficult to keep it down to simple shapes to try and convey this character. I had to force myself to stay on track and just move ahead and see how it turned out; I decided if it went poorly I’d try again and allow my detail urges to be satisfied, and I would more clearly render the armor I’d drawn up in the sketches. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised with this trial. About an hour and a half, maybe two (as I was experimenting). Photoshop. When that was done I added filters. I get mine from this user on deviantart.com: Sirius-sdz
When I added the top filter I ended up with some of his hair showing a bit, just this white line around the crown of his head. I decided to either erase it or run with it; so I ran. I incorporated it into the rest of the image, fading it out near the bottom. That layer is on luminosity to help with the glow effect. It was challenging yet relaxing to work with minimal shapes and colors. I want to try images of this sort for my own comic, but that’s for future trials – a few projects came up very suddenly and I must attend to them first, while keeping my comic updated. More on these projects next time! |
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