story art

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kitty
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Re: story art

Post by kitty »

I'm glad you're continuing to work on those initial letters for UtbS - I always liked their style a lot!

I already mentioned that I don't think that using those leaf symbols out of an existing font is a good idea, they feel a lot like the western typographic culture they come from and not elvish at all (besides being leaves, but yeah...).
And the last one, which has a awesomely fitting color scheme btw, could use a golden border like the other ones as well.


For the question of who'll do the portraits: I would love to. But (you knew that there would be a but, didn't you?) I don't have time atm, I'm finishing a time consuming internship right now and will start my diploma thesis next week... So I'll probably have some spare time here and there, but the project would be finished much quicker if you did it. :hmm: If you find any other project that sparks your interest, I'd ask you to do that first - but if UtbS is what calls out for you right now, you should do it. What is done is done and that will be better for the project as a whole.
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LordBob
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Re: story art

Post by LordBob »

Truly, you'd be more at ease with elves than I would, considering how many of them you've already drawn :lol2:
What I propose is that I'll first focus on story art. If you're nowhere near available when I'm done with it and I don't have another project at hand, then I'll switch to the portraits. If you've found some free time by then, all the better :)
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LordBob
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Re: story art

Post by LordBob »

As a recreational time from portraying, I've been looking again into the subject of story art. The picture below is meant to illustrate both the very first scenario in tRoW and a more sketchy style (compared to portraits, that is).
On the plus side, with such a style, the amount of time required to produce a story screen is significantly cut down (3-4 hours for the one below, and they'll get faster with experience). With such quickly-produced - yet efficent - art, we could eventually display a unique story screen for every single scenario in a campaign.

Now the question is :
- Do we want this ?
- Can we afford it ? (from what I gather, the BfW download archive has gotten quite heavy lately)

Even if we do not want this specific style, maybe it's about time that we start thinking of what we'd like to do with story art in the future. Portrait work has progressed enough that we can look this, I think.
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tRoW_story_01-A_Summer_of_Storms.jpg
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doofus-01
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Re: story art

Post by doofus-01 »

LordBob wrote:Now the question is :
- Do we want this ?
- Can we afford it ? (from what I gather, the BfW download archive has gotten quite heavy lately)
Not that I'm calling any of the shots, but speaking as a UMC author I'd say story images are useful. Especially if they are somewhat generic and in core images, like the ones Kitty posted at the start of this thread.

This one doesn't look so specific to any particular campaign, I think it could be general use.

If you want to fill out the specific campaign story screens, that is another matter and I can't comment. I just wanted to suggest the general use images.
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thespaceinvader
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Re: story art

Post by thespaceinvader »

Looks great to me, and image illustrations aren't that huge. I'd say go for it.

Music is the real killer on download size.
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LordBob
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Re: story art

Post by LordBob »

doofus: it's only specific in that the central 3 characters are designed after portraits from tRoW. Though this set aside, the image is pretty much a generic for loys vs outlaws indeed ^_^

TSI: file size comment duly noted.
Atz
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Re: story art

Post by Atz »

Wow, that's pretty awesome. I say go for it.
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A-Red
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Re: story art

Post by A-Red »

Beautiful. You can always do a mix--some designed to be generic, and some, like this one, specific to the campaign.
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Sgt. Groovy
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Re: story art

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

The sketchy style looks good otherwise, but the clouds are too sketchy.
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Atz
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Re: story art

Post by Atz »

Sgt. Groovy wrote:The sketchy style looks good otherwise, but the clouds are too sketchy.
Personally, I think they're fine. They're supposed to be indistinct to simulate depth-of-field.
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Girgistian
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Re: story art

Post by Girgistian »

Aargh! All that vividness... My eyes! :augh:

It's cool, that's for sure, and the sketchy style looks pretty good, but I can't help thinking that Wesnoth might deserve at least slightly more gritty story art, as in, not that saturated. As for the level of detail, you could very well go with what you've portrayed and call it professional, but the clouds are a bit obstructive with their current blurriness - they need a form despite the sketchiness. Overall it's a job well done though. :D
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LordBob
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Re: story art

Post by LordBob »

I'll give the clouds some love, but I do like their bumpiness so don't expect much change in their overall aspect. If I can, I'll refine their shape but retain the sketchiness.
As to the saturated colours, I wanted to give the picture the warm feel of a summer day's light, though I might have overdone it.

All in all, I'm glad this experiment is appreciated. I'll further explore the concept in a near future, though don't expect anything serious before I'm done with the overhaul of Sceptre of Fire portraits
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Re: story art

Post by fabi »

I was fine with the clouds as long as I believed they would be a mountain :)
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Jetrel
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Re: story art

Post by Jetrel »

thespaceinvader wrote:Looks great to me, and image illustrations aren't that huge. I'd say go for it.

Music is the real killer on download size.
This actually could stand to be overstated. :wink:

A compressed fullscreen jpg, compressed lightly enough that there's no visible loss of quality, is about 250-500kb (e.g. 0.25-0.5 mb).
A single compressed song is about 4-8mb.

Story images for the entirety of one of our biggest campaigns would amount to only a single song.
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LordBob
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Re: story art

Post by LordBob »

I've reworked the clouds and saturation for the first picture.Also, work in progress fot the second scenario.
I'm seriously considering story art as my next big project, so it will help if we have already defined somewhere a set of standard min:max sizes for our story art, in the same way we have standards for portraits. A clue, anyone ?
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Haldric and his father Eldaric must defeat the Wesfolk in their escape before the onslaught of the orcs
Haldric and his father Eldaric must defeat the Wesfolk in their escape before the onslaught of the orcs
Haldric and his father Eldaric defend their country against Wesfolk raiders
Haldric and his father Eldaric defend their country against Wesfolk raiders
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