Campaign art - The Rise of Wesnoth

[thespaceinvader]

I'd suggest maybe her lips are a little large, but otherwise, she looks good =)

[LordBob]

I'll see to her lips and neck (which I might simply hide with more streaks of hair), but I'm getting a creepy feeling that her head might be a tad too small. I'll wait for Kitty's word on all this before I do any shading.

Until she next visits this forum, here's also the final lineart for Typhon.
Now to draw Jevyan...

[Sgt. Groovy]

It's very good otherwise, but there's some asymmetry going on with the helmet. The blue line is the horizontal of the face, as determined by the eyes. The red line connects the edges of the helmet rim, and they should be on the same level, but the red line is completely unparallel with the blue one. The green line shows how I would read the far edge if it was symmetric with the near edge. It also shows how the edge would continue behind the head if it's supposed to connect with the visible side, so there's something wrong with the backside as well.

[LordBob]

Duly noted. Will take care of it one way or the other (i.e. not sure wether I'll make the rear edge shorter or enlarge the front one).

Last but not least, Jevyan. If tha's any use, I could do an alternate portrait for him that show him at rest with his robes hiding his body.

Once these guys will be shaded, we'll be left with only Rithrandil to take care of...

[dipseydoodle]

His arms and that spinal thing looks slightly confusing... Refresh me... Is Jevyan supposed to be an ancient lich?

[LordBob]

Precisely. Hence the disturbing extra limbs and bits of everything. There's been a debate over the summer regarding what an ancient lich ought to look like : in doubt, refer to it.

Flats and fixed helm for Typhon

Edit : and also flats for Jevyan. Note the rather colourful scheme (for an undead, that is) : Jevyan being an ancient lich, it had been said that he'd be more into rich garment than gloomy black. Though if all those riches are too much, I'll switch this cape to shades of grey.

[dipseydoodle]

Cool... Would a merman tattoo work by chance? I would imagine he would have one.

[LordBob]

Last one for the day : I began sketches for Rithrandil. Below are different concepts, each taking interest in the features of the Wose as well as how the portrait will show him : framing, how we do or do not use the cropping limit, possible presence of vague silhouettes for scale...All of this is but a study and at an early stage, so your input is welcome

[Golden_Soldier]

Id say 1 is best

[thespaceinvader]

2 or 4.

[kitty]

And so much great new pictures again!

About the new liney shading style on Aryad and Isothimir - I'm curious: Could you describe your new approach in more detail? Is it purely an asthetic choice or more of an improvement of the workflow? (And of course both look great!)

The new version of Dionli has much more attitude! But I'm with zookeeper, there's something off about her neck's anatomy, mainly the missing trapezius. And the proportions of her rear arm/hand seem a bit off, the hand is too big for the extremely slender forearm.

Jevyan's colour choices seem a bit gaudy right now but since that will change a lot with shading I'm happy to wait to see how he'll turn out. Typhon is shaping up nicely.

And while I love the general feel of your Rithrandil sketches 1, 2 and 4 will have a major problem when shown alternately with our humanoids in dialogues - he'll be tiny... I just would like to have a solution that would appear appropriately gigantic in comparison but probably that's technically impossible. And variant 3 will appear very strange because of our cropping limitations... I don't have a solution I could wholeheartedly back up myself - so all I can say is that I really like number four, it seems like a seldomly seen variant of the ent/wose/treeman concept!
The little silhouettes you put next to the wose - are they just for scale reference or would you plan to draw those too in the final version?

[zookeeper]

Typhon and Jevyan seem to be coming up well enough, no comments there (except that I really like Typhon's helmet)...

I'm not sure what to say about Rithrandil. Woses are difficult to fit into portraits, but I'm not sure if portraying them from a distance works very well either. However, it might be possible that we could get more than 500px of vertical space: if the screen height would be lower than the portrait's height, it'd simply get cropped at the top edge, which wouldn't be a problem if the important parts of the portrait (like the face) are in the lower parts of the portrait. I haven't been able to confirm whether we could get support for something like that anytime soon though, but if we could, would that help?

[LordBob]

Kitty : the man behind this approach is french comic artist Moebius. The idea is to fill dark areas with hatching that follows the curve of the shadowed surface (such as can be seen on this picture), resulting in a surface that's easier to read, and has simple yet efficient shading. A deeper shadow is obtained by increasing the weight and density of the hatching.
Note that when shading, the same method can be applied to lighting.
To me, it's both an esthetic choice and an improvement :
- Less toying with fusion modes and/or colour swatches as your entire range can be obtained with 3, 4 colours.
- Faster to apply if you're more at ease with drawing than shading
- Gives your shading a textured quality
- Plus it's fun to experiment new techniques

Zookeeper : being allowed to break the 500*500 limit would definitely help when portraying the Wose (and other large monsters, hint, hint )
Considering people's return, I'll orient further sketches in a mix of variant #4 with a framing similar to #3. Anyway, the final portrait will feature small undefined silhouettes meant to show the scale, so using it next to our other humanoids shouldn't be too much of a problem.


And now for something completely different : as a recreational activity from portraying, I've been working for some time on a title screen for the campaign. Obviously there's still work to do, especially the positionning of the title, not to mention matters of localization, but still I thought I'd share.

[thespaceinvader]

Me like. And yeah, being able to break 500x500 in a select few cases (NOT for every long weapon that comes up) would be a great boon. Would it be possible to make some sort of tiled system for portraits, such that the bottom half is 500x500, and the upper half can spread out a bit more? That would be ideal for making woses, dragons etc seem to tower over other units.

[JackBarber]

LordBob, that is amazing... it looks like it came straight from the cover of an old console RPG.