Carry on my Wayward Son - The beginning of year 3
Just to be clear I chose this title for the name of this post because I thought it sound cool and I was listening to Kansas - Carry on Wayward Son
So it’s finally happening I have somehow got to my third and final year of Game Art and truth be told I’m not sure if I am ready yet. Well to be accurate let’s say 40% of me feels this way after handing in my first 3 week project the JC Leyendecker Viking brief. Ahh this brief I loved it so much. It was so challenging but gratifying at the same time. So much so that I am having doubts in a 3d career because although I love sculpting and modelling to an extent just that feeling I get from failing and learning in 2d as compared to 3ds’ sometime constant technical troubleshooting, one feels a greater sense of growth when messing up in 2d and say realising I need to study more material rendering techniques.
Anyway let’s get to discussing these past 3 weeks. So I have been in 3rd year for 3 weeks working on a partially stylised concept brief; the JC Leyendecker Viking brief in which I have been tasked to concept 6 Viking characters in the style of the acclaimed American artist JC Leyendecker.
1932 Leyendecker cover image for the “Saturday Evening Post
Anyway let’s get to discussing these past 3 weeks. So I have been in 3rd year for 3 weeks working on a partially stylised concept brief; the JC Leyendecker Viking brief in which I have been tasked to concept 6 Viking characters in the style of the acclaimed American artist JC Leyendecker. What seemed to be an interesting yet herculean task became a very satisfying and enlightening project. The very idea of concepting and illustrating 6 characters during the first week seemed like a large task for me to handle and I was worried how this would affect my mood and stress output. I envisioned myself doing sleepless all nighters and running purely on coffee and energy drinks. This was however not the case and I would partly like to credit this to the new staff and support the course offers as well as the Polycount community.
These two communities guided me and helped break down what seemed like such a large task into a much more manageable and enjoyable workflow. During the first week I spent half the week researching JC Leyendeckers style via digital painting studies as well as reading about his process and some of his life in the JC Leyendecker artbook.
3 Studies I produced
Leyendecker Artbook
From my research I had found that what makes Leynedeckers style so distinct is how he handled edge control in his paintings, opting for a more sculpted and angular look to his painting using very descriptive brush strokes. In addition to this I noticed that the artist features very transparent/opaque shadows in this paintings coupled with very thick highlights and midtones. Finally, I had noticed that the choice of colours that Leyendecker uses range from very muted warm autumn esc colours. This information about colour really helped and influenced my colour palette for my illustrated characters in the future.
Research
In the first week of this project I was initially struggling with how to handle concepting the characters as I was concepting each of the characters by themselves without thinking about their relation to one another. If I wasn’t for the feedback, I received from students on the course about changing my mind-set and workflow I don’t not believe I would have made the deadline for today. I was told rather than trying to taking on each character one at a time I should do some thumbnails sketches with all my initial character ideas together and then go from there. This helped greatly as it helped to eliminate two factors that were slowing down my work. Fear of failure and a general reluctancy to work as a result of this fear. With thumbnails I could fail in a very controlled and successful way.
Old way of concepting
Changing my approach
In addition, support from the tutors allowed me to conquer another factor that was slowing down the production of work, which was the value and colour iterations of my characters. Again I was trying to do too much at once however with the support from tutors I was directed towards a much more digestible way of iterating with values and colour. Working with values I was told to work from 3 midtones 1 being the darkest of the value key and the other being the lightest and finally one in the middle. This allowed me to pick value patterns with much more precision and confidence. Moreover, the advice I received on colour was an even greater help. It entailed picking from a range of images which best described the style I would work from and pixelating them to give me a focused gamut of colour to work from.
Old way of iterating colour and value
New way based on Tutor feedback
These solid workflows allowed me to execute my concepts and illustrations I feel with a much more directed focus.
Now when discussing the work, I handed in itself. I designed 6 characters each with their own dichotomy between the pairs. The sort of game I had in mind when concepting these characters were that of adventure RPGS such as the legend of Zelda and the fable series.
Zelda (left) Fable (Right)
I wanted to convey a sense of playfulness to the overall theme of my project. I feel this is best illustrated in the pair of the king of the dead character and his right hand man whom was his literal right hand. Games such as fable inspired both in style as well as humour and I hope I have communicated this across. The main bulk of my research was looking into games that inspired me as well as Viking larp events for reference.
My thinking was since the project is partially stylised I would have some leeway when it comes to historical accuracy hence featuring romanticised Viking ideas such as helmets with horns as well as basing majority of my research on Viking larps instead of actual Viking history. I felt that by basing it more on these fantasy ideals rather than actual Viking history this will allow me to create and develop much more exciting and fantastical designs.
All in all, with this first project done I feel that it has pushed me to grow and adapt which I am very grateful for. The next project planned will be the king of the dead project which I will be taking my concept from this project and then modelling it. I’m quite concerned whether I’ll enjoy this next one as its workflow is so different the Viking project however at the time of writing this blog post I feel very burnt out and I am in need of a break.
Below is a slideshow documenting all the work I produced for this project.
