A public dumping ground for words and pictures. Contact me at ThomasTamblyn@Gmail.com

Sunday 6 December 2009

Shepherd's Respite?

A champion for the forest witches. I may have gotten overexcited here.

Did the sketch last night in bed. Burst of creativity. Leapt straight from vector to colouring without making any variants. To top it off I went OTT with the detailing.

But I like it.

The vine limbs: I was happy with the compromise between volume and stringiness in the line work, but come colour time I saw an easy way to make them vine-ier and I took it. Also a little watermelonish but.... let's overlook that.

The rust was originally moss, but it worked better after a hue shift and a drop in luminescence. It's probably the detail I'd drop first to tone down the knight. I did have full two-tone on the shield, but it pulled it into the forground too much, so I dropped the light spackles. That works.

Spikes on the morning star also got a little extra colour. It's hard to be restrained; start tarting up one bit and everything else looks too dowdy.

I could make variants for this I think. Changing up which bits are armour and which are vines, different weapons/shields and helms. But I'm happy enough with this as a (temporarily) final piece that I don't feel like fiddling right now.

Something I want to point out; on the sketch he had a chipped sword and a kite shield. The hilt+hand largely obscured the knee plate, so I went for a hafted weapon. Besides, I have too many swords. After looking at it for a bit, I had an idea and made the shield a round wooden one. If this is the vine-animated armour of some long-dead knight, then his gear is going to be a bit old fashioned. My undeveloped knights theme has a lot of kite shields and swords you see, so this differentiates him.

Hmm - is he animated by the vines, or by the spirit of the dead knight (with the vines serving as surrogate body)? I don't know.

Might try remaking the vine golem with some of the new tricks I learned here. He's too fiddly at the moment and could do with some variants. Something for a rainy day.

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