The Senate/Parliament. Situated in the capitol and inspired by st peters cathedral and the Reichstag. This is where the senators convene for meetings and decide policy. large central dome room has stained glass ceilings and a skylight. outer buildings have offices and meeting rooms and archives.
story wise this location would be playable and fully explorable, but would be destroyed and turned into memorial gardens after the timeskip. After pushback from senators on policy, Lucien and his advisors would orchestrate the bombing or burning (undecided) of the Pantheon, during session. This would allow Lucien to blame his enemies (the Ophirans), eliminate his senators and declare a state of emergency/martial law in the ensuing panic. This event would parallel the burning of the reichstag and hitler’s Declaration of martial law.
Initial Dome design: i like the idea of it being two-tiered.
i started designing some glass portraits of previous leaders for the ceiling but these are still in progress and haven’t been incorporated yet.
early colour concept
making the dome
surrounding building
i felt that it didnt have enough colour so i made the pillars red marble and then added clouds for contrast.
started designing banners. Since this is the symbol for a fascist and authoritarian empire i took inspiration from real-world fascist imagery and the Nazi eagle, as well as religious imagery and ancient roman sigils. i ended up with an angel with spread wings which matched the silhouette i had already come up with: a cross with a circle in the middle. variants of this shape appear as symbols throughout the story – the three points of the cross represent the three suns and the central circle represents the planet, while the cross also evokes catholic imagery.
here is the current WIP of the pantheon.
next i will fix up the gardens, add some small people walking towards to building for scale and add the stained glass roof on the dome.
After my success in creating thumbnails for Arktias I wanted to create more for other characters and started on Rosamine’s. I first did two quick sketches of how I envisioned her both as a student and as a politician.
Then I tried to plot out the anatomy for her poses.
After figuring out the specifics of the pose I moved into rendering the body.
Once I had completed the body I started on rendering the face, initially starting with a colour block-out.
I rendered different features individually using the same process that I used to create Arktias’ face.
I felt that she didn’t look how I had imagined so I changed her eye shape to make her eyelids much larger, which in turn made her eyes look droopier and her expression more judgemental (fitting for her personality).
I mirrored and altered the eye before moving the pupils to look into that middle distance rather than to the side, then added subtle eyelashes and soft eyebrows. The hair is only a colour block-out right now but my next step will be to try and render it.
Once I was happy with a rendered body and face I started thumbnailing the costumes for student self.
I consulted with my peers to determine the best outfits for her, and decided on my initial two thumbnails as her primary design idea. While I was fond of the far-right designs and my 4th design, I felt that these didn’t fit her character at this point in her story, but will add these as ideas for her Act 3 portrait since they look like clothes a sci-fi Politician might wear. I’m very happy with how her face turned out and I think I managed to avoid falling into the common mistake of ‘same-face syndrome’ between my characters, something I have struggled with before.
I wanted to create a visualisation of Lucien at different stages of his life: childhood (while still nominated as heir), teenage years (sullen and miserable) and eventually adulthood (the antagonist). I wanted to show contrast through his expression while still keeping his appearance consistent, and checked online to find advice on aging characters.
The next steps I will take for this piece will be to:
• Amend Lucien’s hair colour to be more blond, as I originally intended for his hair to be a platinum colour.
• Paint adult Lucien’s armour white with embedded rubies.
• Push the facial expressions further, as I feel they don’t currently tell the viewer enough.
Below you can see the process of my painting. I initially started with the teenaged version of Lucien and then used that as my baseline.
Refrences:
‘markcrilley’ (2016). How to Draw Babies, Teens, & Adults. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM7ofqrkBuk How to Draw Babies, Teens, & Adults
This piece is the most technically challenging I have ever undertaken, as it requires action composition and a good understanding of lighting to draw the viewer’s attention (both of which I am weak on). To prepare for this piece I have been looking at the work of Billy Christian, who has great composition work. I want to create an illustration of a pivotal moment from Arktias’ backstory; the moment her mother was publicly assassinated. I went through many variations of this composition (documented on my blog) and after struggling to find one I was happy with I opened up Blender and made a vague block-out of character placement. From here I was able to start rendering Jhandra, though I am still unhappy with how this looks, yet lack the skills to be able to tell why. I hope to amend this by getting professional feedback which will hopefully elevate this piece into something I can be happy with.
The next steps I will take for this piece will be to:
• Blockout and render Arktias
• Amend lighting to ensure the focus of the piece is on Arktias (green sketch figure)
• Complete the crowd in the background
• Improve composition by asking for professional and peer feedback
Since Arktias is my main protagonist I wanted to have a clear idea of her costumes for the story. I created many thumbnails for different outfits she could wear and consulted my peers to receive votes on the ones they liked and the ones they didn’t. These costumes had a variety of inspirations from Guo Pei, Papal robes, Plantagenet-era amour, byzantine fashion and Tudor-era tunics.
Here I began on a main portrait piece of Arktias after concepting different outfits and poses for her. I sought inspiration from classical royal portraits from the 1500s-1800s era, focusing on portraits of young and ambitious lords or monarchs. I also focused on portraits of men, rather than women, due to the societal roles of men and male heirs better reflecting my characters status in her society. The exception to this rule was a portrait of Queen Elizabeth the 1st, the ‘Armada Portrait’ (1588) by an unknown painter, where she rests a hand atop a globe to represent her international influence and command of the seas. I thought that it would be interesting to mirror this by having Arktias’s hand rest on a spherical representation of a galactic (or intergalactic) map. For her other hand, I considered having her hand rest upon the hilt of a sword, to show her atypically unstable reign, and to represent the conflict that her ascension to the throne wrought. Alternatively to both these ideas, I studied religious, Christian paintings to determine the hand symbols and positions of saints and angels.
After settling on a pose that i liked I began rendering the face. I went through many variations of eye, nose and lips size/shape, keeping these on separate layers until i was happy with the layout. I chose a blank expression initially so that I would have a base, neutral expression to work from in future.
I then started on the armour, going through multiple variations of rendering and ending up unhappy with all of them. While the first two efforts felt cartoony, the third had no shine and the other three had far too much. The wyvern pattern is also temporarily cut from the armour while I determine if this animal is actually representative of her family or not.
At this point I tried to change her expression into a pensive and concerned one, but feel that it still lacks emotion.
I started sketching and then rendering a neutral pose for Arktias to use as a base for outfit renders, as I realised at this stage that I was lost creatively and needed to explore alternative designs more.
Here I adapted the 5 most popular designs from my thumbnails into half-rendered pieces with colour. These were great to do because they have really helped with my visualisation and concepting skills.
I then became slightly side-tracked and tried to de-age Arktias to her Act 2 and Act 1 appearances to get an idea for how she would have looked in those stages. I also made a quick drawing of Act 1 Kyt’s proportions to Act 3 Kyt.
I made a few quick semi-renders for Arktias’ Act 1 costumes, but have realised since that I had made a proportion mistake that I’m quite embarrassed to have initially missed; the arms are far too short for a child’s proportions, so I will alter these as next steps.
This is Arktias’ full portrait so far, with a newly rendered breastplate to be converted to gold. I think that I can quite quickly finish this piece now that I am more confident at rendering quickly from making my costume renders.
I felt that I was having difficulty portraying emotion in my characters, as they all seemed very neutral, even though Arktias in my mind is very expressive. To amend this I created an expression sheet to show how I imagine Arktias showing a range of emotions. As pictured below: neutral, happy, frightened/visions, surprised, smiling, miffed, upset, annoyed, bored and disgusted. I’d like to make a few more including sad, pensive, confused, laughing and sympathetic. I really enjoyed this exercise and feel it was very productive as it helped me grow in my confidence expressing emotions. For my next steps I will add more emotions and then create similar expression sheets for my other main characters.
