Warrior design development
Following last week's tutorials I had to work on the fantasy side of my design as they weren't fantasy enough. At this point having to work from home is getting tiresome and I am struggling to work every day. For anyone in the future looking back on this blog (whoever you may be) this is the time that we uni students had to still do a whole MA in the midst of a national lockdown due to a pandemic (Coronavirus). I feel increasingly exhausted and I have little hope of what is to come next. Sometimes I wonder if this degree is even worth anything??
Anyway here's the work I managed to do since last week:
First is the work I showed to my tutors already, alternative designs for the mage class. Still pretty basic but I wanted to play with various colours and try to implement the flower designs I had created into some designs to see how they looked. Playing with colour helps with trying to create eye-catching designs, and I particularly liked the lighter version on the left of a previous design on my last post. I think this also helps distinguish itself from my first jewellery mage design as they look very different in style, shape and colour, thus do not share a visual language.
Next is the warrior design development. I had to find a way to make the designs look more like fantasy rather than realistic. I tried. I really tried. I don't know what it was about this week but from mental and physical exhaustion my creativity has left my body and I am a shell which merely draws until my wrist hurts. It's hurting right now as I type. Haha.
Did some head shots below with jewellery aesthetic/something that looked like something:
I'm not sure if these even belong to the warrior class? They were more self-indulgent than actual development but I thought it would be nice to somehow incorporate more extravagant headpieces into the warrior design in an attempt to make them more fantasy. We shall see...
Next I did some new warrior designs below. My grandma liked them both but especially the one on the far right. She thought the pointy fingers looked cool. It felt nice to be encouraged in an unexpected way, considering she has no idea what I'm studying at university.
For the design on the right, I tried to make jewellery a central theme to the design with the beaded veil, gloves and chest piece which was supposed to look like it's meant to be worn. The clothing is similar to salwar kameez as I wanted to make sure the design looked South Asian. With the design on the left I tried to make the clothing more ornate to see if that would help with the fantasy part. The chest piece also has a studded jewelled look about it as I wanted to feed the jewellery theme through in a less conspicuous way. For minor details I tried to not think too hard about design decisions I made and went with stuff that I thought looked cool e.g. white streak in hair.
Personally I thought that my work wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. The designs seemed to lack any flare and I was a bit lost in which direction I should take. Although my jewellery mage design was simple, I thought at least it worked in composition without any gimmicks. At this point I think I was just trying to produce work, even if not particularly inspiring. I tried to take Jim's advice in that eventually something would come out of this ever-lasting cycle of drawing. So, the drawing cycle continues...
I can't really explain the drawings I did below. I was basically doodling during my Wednesday tutorial this week and came up with this. I really hate it but I'm supposed to upload all work I do so here it is. I even did a colour version of the one on the right using the new colour scheme which includes the lilac in my mage design (as I forgot to include it in the previous colour warrior designs). They're not even South Asian inspired, I was literally drawing from my own head as at this point I was sick of looking at jewellery. I know the jewellery was my own idea but I needed a break tbh.
Since Wednesday I tried to focus better and find potential references to use in my design. Who knew that concepting was this difficult??(!) I ended up drawing these below. I know they're still not very fantasy in clothing but I tried to explore different outfit styles. I think on the left I was more successful in producing a simple, clean design that is easy to read.
On the right, I tried to make the outfit more excessive through adding a headpiece which is at the moment purely an aesthetic, along with ribbon streamers type thing at the shoulders which cascade to the floor but don't really add anything in terms of combat. The outfit is covered in embroidery (which I simplified here as the drawing was small) and even tried to include a sparkly veil to the headpiece just because. The weapon shape is meant to be crescent moon-like to juxtapose with the sun-like headpiece, plus it is a lot bigger than I usually would draw, as I have been told big things can help with the fantasy aesthetic.
Currently I am working on the design below (still a WIP). I think this is getting there in terms of clean design + fantasy elements + jewellery. I still need to figure out what the "ropes" become when wielded (either turn into an animal or a sharp weapon like spikes etc.) but I do like the overall look of it. I tried incorporating previous design elements such as the patterned clothing, heavy embroidery around the chest area and included a new combative element (ropes). They are inspired by a combination of roped jewellery and scarves which are wrapped tightly to form a twisted rope shape. I still need to figure out what type of headpiece (if any) the warrior will be wearing as well. I want to try to make this design more cohesive than my previous attempts. We'll see how it goes.
Finally, some references I have been using to inform my designs throughout:
Anyway here's the work I managed to do since last week:
First is the work I showed to my tutors already, alternative designs for the mage class. Still pretty basic but I wanted to play with various colours and try to implement the flower designs I had created into some designs to see how they looked. Playing with colour helps with trying to create eye-catching designs, and I particularly liked the lighter version on the left of a previous design on my last post. I think this also helps distinguish itself from my first jewellery mage design as they look very different in style, shape and colour, thus do not share a visual language.
Next is the warrior design development. I had to find a way to make the designs look more like fantasy rather than realistic. I tried. I really tried. I don't know what it was about this week but from mental and physical exhaustion my creativity has left my body and I am a shell which merely draws until my wrist hurts. It's hurting right now as I type. Haha.
Did some head shots below with jewellery aesthetic/something that looked like something:
I'm not sure if these even belong to the warrior class? They were more self-indulgent than actual development but I thought it would be nice to somehow incorporate more extravagant headpieces into the warrior design in an attempt to make them more fantasy. We shall see...
Next I did some new warrior designs below. My grandma liked them both but especially the one on the far right. She thought the pointy fingers looked cool. It felt nice to be encouraged in an unexpected way, considering she has no idea what I'm studying at university.
For the design on the right, I tried to make jewellery a central theme to the design with the beaded veil, gloves and chest piece which was supposed to look like it's meant to be worn. The clothing is similar to salwar kameez as I wanted to make sure the design looked South Asian. With the design on the left I tried to make the clothing more ornate to see if that would help with the fantasy part. The chest piece also has a studded jewelled look about it as I wanted to feed the jewellery theme through in a less conspicuous way. For minor details I tried to not think too hard about design decisions I made and went with stuff that I thought looked cool e.g. white streak in hair.
Personally I thought that my work wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. The designs seemed to lack any flare and I was a bit lost in which direction I should take. Although my jewellery mage design was simple, I thought at least it worked in composition without any gimmicks. At this point I think I was just trying to produce work, even if not particularly inspiring. I tried to take Jim's advice in that eventually something would come out of this ever-lasting cycle of drawing. So, the drawing cycle continues...
I can't really explain the drawings I did below. I was basically doodling during my Wednesday tutorial this week and came up with this. I really hate it but I'm supposed to upload all work I do so here it is. I even did a colour version of the one on the right using the new colour scheme which includes the lilac in my mage design (as I forgot to include it in the previous colour warrior designs). They're not even South Asian inspired, I was literally drawing from my own head as at this point I was sick of looking at jewellery. I know the jewellery was my own idea but I needed a break tbh.
On the right, I tried to make the outfit more excessive through adding a headpiece which is at the moment purely an aesthetic, along with ribbon streamers type thing at the shoulders which cascade to the floor but don't really add anything in terms of combat. The outfit is covered in embroidery (which I simplified here as the drawing was small) and even tried to include a sparkly veil to the headpiece just because. The weapon shape is meant to be crescent moon-like to juxtapose with the sun-like headpiece, plus it is a lot bigger than I usually would draw, as I have been told big things can help with the fantasy aesthetic.
Currently I am working on the design below (still a WIP). I think this is getting there in terms of clean design + fantasy elements + jewellery. I still need to figure out what the "ropes" become when wielded (either turn into an animal or a sharp weapon like spikes etc.) but I do like the overall look of it. I tried incorporating previous design elements such as the patterned clothing, heavy embroidery around the chest area and included a new combative element (ropes). They are inspired by a combination of roped jewellery and scarves which are wrapped tightly to form a twisted rope shape. I still need to figure out what type of headpiece (if any) the warrior will be wearing as well. I want to try to make this design more cohesive than my previous attempts. We'll see how it goes.
Finally, some references I have been using to inform my designs throughout:
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