The Legend Of The Phoenix
This ongoing project started as a personal desire of creating designs of several characters, environments and assets in the same universe and try to build something out of it. The purpose would be the possibility to develop a platform game from there.
The idea came from several fantasy influences (Hobb's Ship Of Magic, Tolkien's Bilbo The Hobbit, Warcraft universe, ...) as well as my love for side-scroll platform games (Limbo, Mark Of The Ninja, Ray-Man Origin, ...). I wanted to create artworks that could eventually be used for a platform game that would be set in a dark fantasy atmosphere.
To make the designs I draw sketches with an old pen and then work some shading in photoshop. I spend more time developing the sketches then actually rendering them. I would develop some sort of background story for each character (thinking of their origin, where the hero would meet them in the game, ...) and start sketching main shapes of the body. Then I would define some details, improving and changing some parts along the process. Then I would ink the character with a pen (one of my favourite inking tools) and then clean the drawing and scan it. Finally I would work with 3 colours (dark blue, middle blue colour and white) in photoshop to add some volume and shading to the characters.
A lot of people around me and online were very positive about this project. It's really great to have such feedback and even if this project might not really go much further, I'll keep developing it on the side.
Every project I undertake helps me improve, and this one helped me learn to keep one specific style during the whole thing. As it is a side project, I had to get back to it every now and then between projects during a few weeks, and keeping these artworks consistent wasn't easy.
