Once I began to render, I decided to check in with my mentor to see if I’m missing something important. His notes coloured lime green and blue highlighted a few details I missed. Firstly, I never refined my sketch so I completely missed establishing a proper ground plane. My mentor’s noted pointed out how the train of Matramara’s dress didn’t follow a convincing perspective and advised me to apply a ground plane to my other projects moving forward. We discussed how important ground planes are because they are key to depicting depth and space. His next critique for me was that my forms needed to be clearer through the use of lighting and lines. Here, the belly’s value was far too bright. We discussed toning it down and adding a more focused specular to show the direction of the light source. For the armor pieces, my lines could have been utilised better to define the forms of the body. My last bits of feedback for this was to add more points of interest in high-detail areas.
This was my response to my mentor’s discussion. Painting with depth and space in mind really helped bring my artwork closer to my vision for the outcome. Though there are still some aspects that need to be refined, I feel like this piece is starting to come to life.
With that, I also began designing a prop for this character. This character is a mage so she needed a prop to convey that idea clearly. I explored by taking elements of her dress and translating them into parts of a staff. Overall, I like the shape language and patterns, but I felt that the top piece was too large and would take the attention away from the character’s face. I got a little carried away with the top piece so I needed to reign it back a bit. Otherwise, I felt that my designs were quite interesting and matched the character well.
Looking into props, I made a quick blockout of the Soulfore Blade for me to paint over later. During class, I learnt that utilising 3D was a much more common thing to do nowadays in concept art since it greatly cuts work time by ensuring consistent perspectives.
This is the update for the character illustration. I further refined the lighting situation on the belly, referring to my fundamental light and shadow studies since the form of the belly is essentially a sphere. I also found that I needed a pop of colour to draw the eye closer to the focal points. I decided to use a bright red on the crown and also the chest piece. Adding a pop of red really adds more life to the design because otherwise, she would be mostly grays and gold, which is a very uninteresting palette. I noticed this issue while I played Elden Ring. Elden Ring has a mostly washed-out palette, which makes bright colours pop out and feel more vibrant – which my character lacked beforehand.
Having not painted in a while, I realise that I’ve forgotten to apply key artistic fundamentals such as perspective and lighting. This made me realise that I need to practice my fundamentals more frequently by doing studies or consciously applying it to work more often.
I reworked the staff design to act more as a supplement to the character. I sized down the top piece and simplified a few elements.
Overall, I feel like I got back into the groove of painting and rendering. My mentor told me to read the series ‘How to Think While You Draw’ so that I can remember more of my fundamentals while I work. During this section, I learnt that I need to be more conscious while I paint, because I do know my fundamentals, but I need to be thinking actively to apply it to my work. I always thought that art was just fun, but learning about all of this made me realise why art is a job – it’s because it takes a lot of mental strength and willpower on top of raw skill to take fundamentals and use these tools to solve complex problems.