Standardizing Portraits

[theycallmerooster]

Hi, this is my first post. I'll start off by saying that I really enjoy this project and I feel I have something to offer.

While playing through the game the I've seen the varying quality or complete lack of pictures for certain characters. (like the mage on the two brothers campaign)
I think this game looks amazing, but the current style of the portraits is (without any offence intended to the artists) a little lacking compared to the rest of the game.
I can see though why the style was picked as there are a lot of pictures to take care of (with all the different units) and few artists tackling them

What I am proposing is that maybe one person could take all the portraits needed for main campaigns and redraw them to match a certain style, as that seems to be the biggest variable.

Obviously I have no problem doing this (or else I wouldnt have brought it up) but rather than make this post longer I'll let my work speak for itself
here are a few "renditions" of some of the portraits already made.


this is my first attempt. With the majority of the shading done in pencil. Took me about 30 minutes.


On this sketch I did the shading in photoshop, I liked the little background I made so I used again, but I faded the portrait into the edges.


this is one I havent colored, but I wanted to show how I want to work the portraits up, while sticking to the original design.

I know my drawings arent much better than the originals, but I am up to doing ALL of the portraits.

thoughts and criticism are welcome.

[jdsampayo]

Woa! very good!

I like both, the pencil shade and the photoshop shade, uhmm I think the pencil shade looks more "medieval" but well I'm not an expert...
BTW If main developers don't like your style or if you have free time. Can you help me with the portraits of this faction?

cheers!

EDIT: Hey, we have an obviously very skilled artist offering to do something useful here, so please don't immediately go around asking if he wants to help with some...uh, mexican faction or something. -zookeeper

[zookeeper]

Wow, that's some pretty artwork. The only think I don't think really fits is the parchment-like bordering, I personally like black as a background (yellow parchment wouldn't really fit in message dialogs and so on IMO, among other practical reasons).

Now, I'll leave the actual debate about changing the portrait style of the core portraits to Jetryl and friends, but here's a suggestion: start by converting/drawing the portraits for a single campaign in your style instead of committing either yourself or anyone else into converting all the core portraits. Son of the Black Eye would be a mainline campaign that has basically no good portraits. Campaigns can use different styles for their portraits, so even if we'd end up not wanting to convert all portraits to a new style, we would still be very glad to have a campaign with portraits in that style.

[Shadow]

Yeah pretty cool. I like this style

I think just redoing the portraits would be a waste you are actual good enough to produce new ones. Campaigns authors and others would really appreciate it.

[jdsampayo]

Hey, we have an obviously very skilled artist offering to do something useful here, so please don't immediately go around asking if he wants to help with some...uh, mexican faction or something. -zookeeper

I think it's clear the: "If main developers don't like your style or if you have free time"

anyway...

EDIT: BTW zookeeper, you think than a mexican faction or something will be something useless?

[Dave]

Firstly, welcome!

While playing through the game the I've seen the varying quality or complete lack of pictures for certain characters. (like the mage on the two brothers campaign)

Yes, this is a big problem for us.

What I am proposing is that maybe one person could take all the portraits needed for main campaigns and redraw them to match a certain style, as that seems to be the biggest variable.

Well, this is exactly what we would like, but the problem has been finding an artist with the skill and compulsion to do it.

Normally I would wait for someone like Jetryl to give 'blessings' to the artwork of a potential artist, but in this case I don't think there is any need.

I am no artist, but I know what I like, and I like your art a lot. In fact, I think it's excellent.

We would love for you to draw portraits for all the main characters like this. That would be one of the biggest possible improvements to the game we could have, and it would be widely appreciated by developers and players.

In terms of 'logistics', we have two ways we can proceed, and you can pick the one you prefer:

(1) you can draw images and post them like you have, and we will assign a developer to add the images to the game;

(2) we can make you a developer, giving you SVN access. This will allow you to make changes to the 'master' copy of the game directly. However, obtaining SVN access requires a little technical know-how. We are happy to step you through it if you need.

You could begin with option (1) and then we could consider moving to option (2) later.

Another important detail about contributing to Wesnoth is that everything that is distributed with the game is licensed under a license known as the GPL. The GPL allows other people to use your art in various ways, including modifying it if they want, or for instance, using it with a different game. Please let me know if you have any concerns about this and we can discuss it.

Also if you'd like to chat with the developers more, please use IRC to come to #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net (let me know if you need more details on using IRC).

Regards,

David

[Jetrel]

I am no artist, but I know what I like, and I like your art a lot. In fact, I think it's excellent.

It's well done, and it's in a style that would easily be agreeable to most reasonable people. That said, the same is true of Jason Lutes' work (the fellow who drew the first image you did a rehash of - the lancer). I state this in contrast to certain styles of art, which would be disagreeable to a sizable number of players; very exaggerated anime (c.f. chibi) for one, and the style favored by the campaign "The Rise of Wesnoth". Purists of certain styles (like cell-shading) might complain about your work, but I don't think those complaints would be reasonable.

Normally I would wait for someone like Jetryl to give 'blessings' to the artwork of a potential artist, but in this case I don't think there is any need.

The process for "getting art in the game" is similar in some ways to getting a patch to the code approved. I can't give a black check, but if you do a good job, yes, we'd love to use your art.

- The most important thing is finishing the job. As you said, we have a problem of inconsistency, and we don't have a lot of artists working on portraits - I, for example, am tied up right now with sprites. You would have to do this yourself, and you would have to finish a great many of them, or you'd do nothing to solve the problem of consistency.

- The second, equally important thing is doing a good job. If you can provide them at the same quality as the ones above, that shouldn't be a problem; just make sure you don't have any obvious anatomical errors, technical problems with perspective, shading, etc. This is par for the course for any professional illustration, and I hope you don't find my mention of that pedantic - we get a lot of people who fail that requirement. A lot of people.



In the name of consistency, I would make one non-obvious requirement:
- All portraits should useable on a black background; they should be maskeable in such a way that we could switch from the parchment background, to a black background, if we either saw fit to do so for some reason of of it not fitting with the interface theme (which is fully skinnable, and may be used as such in major campaigns), or if you did not end up finishing a full set, and we wanted to integrate what you had made with our existing work. All promises notwithstanding, you could get "hit by a bus", as they say at Google, and not be around to finish the job. The paper background is cool, but if you didn't finish everything, it would be a serious impediment to consistency.

If push comes to shove, I could do this, myself, from merely what you've already provided, but this would take a significant effort on my part to do all the masking, and in some cases, such as the second image, I'd have to draw portions of the portrait from scratch. The person who would ostensibly have the easiest time doing this would be the original creator of the image, with the layered image files. If this is a major impediment to your workflow, I have a few suggestions that might make it much easier.

(1) you can draw images and post them like you have, and we will assign a developer to add the images to the game;

(2) we can make you a developer, giving you SVN access. This will allow you to make changes to the 'master' copy of the game directly. However, obtaining SVN access requires a little technical know-how. We are happy to step you through it if you need.

We'll stick with #1 for the time being; I'll assign myself as the developer to add in the images.

[turin]

Very nice!

Even if you do plan to redo all the portraits, it might be best to start by making portraits for those units that don't have any yet - then we're not replacing good content, we're just adding content where there was none.

Also, I'd say that even if you do end up redoing all the portraits, we shouldn't delete any of the current ones, just have them not be the ones referenced in the unit files. That way we can start setting up different 'skins', like Jetryl mentioned, so you could have one theme where portraits are in the Lutes style, one where they're in your style, one where they're in the Pickslide/Jormugandr painterly style, etc. And it seems like a good idea anyway to set up a sort of database of high-quality Free artwork.

[theycallmerooster]

Right. That sounds great.

Im fine with working under the impression that if all the portraits arent done (should I get hit by a bus) that you are free to to use all, some, or none of them.

And the above were just examples- any finished projects will be sorted out in more useable, raw formats.

I would like to give the authors a chance to describe or design their intended characters before I revamp everything

Should I start a new thread for that?
is that even going to work?

[theycallmerooster]

Very nice!

Even if you do plan to redo all the portraits, it might be best to start by making portraits for those units that don't have any yet - then we're not replacing good content, we're just adding content where there was none.

Also, I'd say that even if you do end up redoing all the portraits, we shouldn't delete any of the current ones, just have them not be the ones referenced in the unit files. That way we can start setting up different 'skins', like Jetryl mentioned, so you could have one theme where portraits are in the Lutes style, one where they're in your style, one where they're in the Pickslide/Jormugandr painterly style, etc. And it seems like a good idea anyway to set up a sort of database of high-quality Free artwork.

I like that idea a lot. Thats a whole new level of skinning.

[Kestenvarn]

I like that Lancer the more I look at it.

[Jetrel]

I would like to give the authors a chance to describe or design their intended characters before I revamp everything

Should I start a new thread for that?
is that even going to work?

Continue to use this thread. We'll do what we can to help; a good share of the original authors are no longer with us, but we'll do what we can to help describe them.


As turin said, the first targets should be the campaigns with unfinished, or nastily frankensteined portraits (some campaigns made their portraits by doing nasty edits to other portraits). From looking through my (slightly out-of-date: 1.3.3) svn, it appears that the following campaigns could use some love, probably in this order:
- Descent into Darkness
- Son of the Black Eye
- Two Brothers

I would like turin, mythological, or anyone who feels qualified to reply to this post with description lists of all the relevant characters in those three campaigns. In doing so, please also approximately describe how prominent the character is - there are some characters that don't have much screentime.

An example of the format you should use is:
Konrad - (key character) - Young prince, around 18-24 years of age. Fit of body, and well-trained, but obviously a bit green to real combat. Should look optimistic, well-meaning, and honest. Has a price on his head, and concurrently fighting both to overthrow a corrupt queen, and save his own skin.
Sir Kaylan - (very minor character) - Battle-hardened knight, around middle age. Stoic, and gallant, but also wearied by an increasingly hopeless cause. Leads rebel forces against the queen, and does see real action in battle.

[Woodwizzle]

flippin' sweeeet!

[Zhukov]

Suffice to say:

Jackpot!

[theycallmerooster]

Okay, since I have been given the green light on the portraits, I would like settle on a style that everyone is comfortable with.
Obviously the portraits are going to be borderless and just from the torso up.
Either of the two styles above are the simplest options. Although I am open to suggestions on any level- though I would like the painted look over a cell-shaded look.

After that all I would need are some descriptions- or if you feel like letting me work freely I can do that too.

Some things I would also like to know:
- Can I exaggerate a little more. The portriates I have done are pretty standard, but if I come across an ogre-general can I make him really tough and hate-able
- Can I make emotion specific portraits? Ex. If a character yells often could I make a second portrait for this occasion.(this would come later)
-Would it be possible to throw in some cut scene artwork to avoid stagnate work.

also keep in mind that I am colorblind so if something comes out an odd color (which it should not, but just for insurance) It would be best to tell me and not assume that I did this on purpose.