Week 5-7: Thumbnailing and Costume Production
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.
Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I: See for free at the Queen’s House