Gweddry portrait sketch, maybe more!

Scosglen · Post by **Scosglen** » December 25th, 2007, 11:01 am

I'm a total noob to Wesnoth, I've only been playing a few days and have beaten the Southern Guard campagin and am currently working on the Eastern Invasion campaign. I think It's really great how so many people of various skills are working together for free just because they love this project and want to pitch in.

I'm complete rubbish as far as sprites are concerned(big props to all the sprite workers!), but I do love to paint and I thought it would be fun to try my hand at a quick unit portrait to see how it might look in my style. I took Gweddry from Eastern Invasion and used the existing portrait art and his sprite as inspiration for a new version. This was done quickly in grayscale with some multiply layers to slap down some messy color.

I only spent around 30 minutes polishing this up but I'm not sure how well my style fits in when compared to the "Lutes" style portraits most of the game art seems to be based on. Still, if you guys like it, I think it would be fun to do a few that could actually go in the game.

I don't have much time to do 'freebie' stuff like this but if the community can agree on some important npcs or monsters in the mainline campaigns who have a rough portrait or none at all, I'd be willing to give it a shot.

If anyone wants to see more of my stuff, here's a link to my anemic deviantart account http://jayto.deviantart.com/gallery/

Post by **zookeeper** » December 25th, 2007, 11:07 am

EI already has a nice set of portraits, so I wouldn't suggest spending time trying to replace those. Rather create portraits where there currently aren't any: Son of the Black Eye (a mainline campaign in 1.3.x) would be a prime candidate, as it effectively has no good portraits at the moment. Kapou'e, GrÃ¼Ã¼, Inarix, Shan Taum, Lanbec'h and the shamans would be the primary characters of the campaign who should be portraited (I haven't played to the end though, so there might be more there) and it'd be great if someone would do that.

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » December 25th, 2007, 3:05 pm

The style is awesome, by the way. Campaign art outwith portraits (i.e. cutscenes) look excellent in the painted style, even if it doesn't match the in-game art.

- Chris

Captain_Rage · Post by **Captain_Rage** » December 25th, 2007, 4:10 pm

Extremely nice style and portrait I must say!

Personally I would love to see this in the actual game.

Blueblaze · Post by **Blueblaze** » December 25th, 2007, 6:58 pm

Captain_Rage wrote:Extremely nice style and portrait I must say! :D
Personally I would love to see this in the actual game.

You may think the style is nice, and it may or may not be (I personally don't care for it) but the portraits need to fit into the style that Wesnoth currently has. Otherwise, we'll have to redo every portrait to match the 'new' style.

Post by **Neoskel** » December 25th, 2007, 8:10 pm

It would be awesome for story art if not the actual portrait.

I would say keep doing these, even if they don't get into mainline. When people start realizing that the other campaigns have nicer art than mainline they'll get around to changing stuff.

Post by **Thrawn** » December 25th, 2007, 10:17 pm

Blueblaze wrote:
Captain_Rage wrote:Extremely nice style and portrait I must say!
Personally I would love to see this in the actual game.
You may think the style is nice, and it may or may not be (I personally don't care for it) but the portraits need to fit into the style that Wesnoth currently has. Otherwise, we'll have to redo every portrait to match the 'new' style.

blueblaze--this is a rough sketch--I actually think that if he devoted more time/ cleaned it up that you would like it <_< don't judge until it's finished... <_<

@ Scosglen: wanna finish this up (regardless of whether it is included or not) just so that we can get a better look at your talent?

About the portrait dilemna. We have unified the style the sprites for main line (making them a consistent size, style, etc), and getting all the sprites complete has taken more of a top priority than portraits. Because of this we are generally looking for works that fit with the previous styles: primarily cell-shaded like the work of jason lutes (almost all the humans are done in this style).

But this isn't to say that this will be the style we want--it is just the simplest to produce decent quality work in. But until the sprite project is finished, this question of what exactly we want in the future is unanswered.

This leaves you with a couple options:
1. Helping make portraits and story art for User-Made Campaigns (as suggested before)

2. Trying to imitate the style already around. Several people want to help contribute were put off by this, but the best analogy would be people working for a commercial game. Even though they have an actual team of artists, they all have to be consistent. We pride ourselves on being as professional as possible, so...

If you choose this option, you could probably immediately become very valuable to the project--your example of a quick work shows talent, and the style we have now is quite easy to learn.

3. Show that you are skilled enough and devoted enough to the project and try to recreate all the portraits in your style. I don't recommend this though, even if it may sound like I'm challenging you to do it. It would mean a LOT of work--enough to probably burn you out (hell, lutes disappeared, and he was creating art in a simpler style than you seem accustomed to). It would also mean that you not only have talent, but a really sound understanding of portraiture, including theories behind proper shading and other such things. You may have that, in which case your in better shape in doing portraits than Jetryl is himself.

Plus, you could start doing this and be told by someone with more say than me (almost everyone...<_<) that it won't be included.

4. Wait around and see how things develop as the question comes back up.

Regardless of how they are used, I'd love to see more of your work!

EDIT: looking at your DA account, you seem to have lots of the stuff I was thinking about in point 3 down.

Post by **zookeeper** » December 25th, 2007, 10:37 pm

Yet I feel the need to restate that not every campaign needs to use the default lutesian style. You can do portraits for a campaign just fine using your style (or a more polished version of it, whatever), as long as you do the whole set of portraits for that campaign. EI, UtBS, SoF, NR and TRoW all have different portrait styles, yet that's not a problem because the style remains the same in each one.

Darn! I knew I was forgetting something...and sorry for editing this. Peace--Thrawn

Captain_Rage · Post by **Captain_Rage** » December 26th, 2007, 12:14 am

Blueblaze wrote:
Captain_Rage wrote:Extremely nice style and portrait I must say!
Personally I would love to see this in the actual game.
You may think the style is nice, and it may or may not be (I personally don't care for it) but the portraits need to fit into the style that Wesnoth currently has. Otherwise, we'll have to redo every portrait to match the 'new' style.

Yes, I understand this problem. But as zookeeper pointed out in the post above, the art style in the campaigns tends to differ. I don't see a problem that this (in my opinion) very nice style could be adopted for atleast one particular campaign.

Post by **turin** » December 26th, 2007, 1:11 am

Guys... if anybody bothered to look at his deviantart gallery, he clearly has the skills to draw portraits...

Scosglen, I think the best thing you could do is: pick a campaign you like that doesn't have portraits and do portraits for the half-dozen or however many characters the campaign has.

Incidentally, t seems to me that, since the Lutesian style isn't exactly ideal, we're better off getting more painterly-style portraits anyway.

Post by **Thrawn** » December 26th, 2007, 1:25 am

turin wrote:Guys... if anybody bothered to look at his deviantart gallery, he clearly has the skills to draw portraits...

Scosglen, I think the best thing you could do is: pick a campaign you like that doesn't have portraits and do portraits for the half-dozen or however many characters the campaign has.

Incidentally, t seems to me that, since the Lutesian style isn't exactly ideal, we're better off getting more painterly-style portraits anyway.

I agree with this post 100%

Post by **zookeeper** » December 26th, 2007, 1:35 am

Currently (in 1.3.12) the ones with the need for a complete new set of portraits would be Son of the Black Eye, An Orcish Incursion and The Hammer of Thursagan (thread for that here).

Post by **Jetrel** » December 26th, 2007, 3:05 am

zookeeper wrote:Currently (in 1.3.12) the ones with the need for a complete new set of portraits would be Son of the Black Eye, An Orcish Incursion and The Hammer of Thursagan (thread for that here).

Please draw portraits for the campaigns zookeeper has listed here.

You can find "Son of the Black Eye" and "An Orcish Incursion" in a current copy of 1.3.12 - just download it, play them, and you'll rapidly be able to see which characters need portraits. Also, please feel free to overrun any portrait art already in one of those campaigns.

Zookeeper provided a link to the relevant info for "The Hammer of Thursagan"; there should be a character list there. If not, I can post one.