Week summary - 2

 Project: Design an insect, week 2

Face studies

This week was mainly a process of refining ideas. After working up to a silhouette I thought was effective, I started working on individual features like these face studies. I also started looking at colour schemes, referencing from actual desert insects, doing some very quick and messy overlays just to get an idea of what kind of colours I could use, before moving on to the character sheet and final concept piece.

Colour schemes

Rough colour ideas

Rough face colouring ideas

For the character sheet, I made sure to include any details and notes I felt might be useful to someone else using this character, as well as a few different poses to reference and a full coloured version of the insect.

Character sheet

As for the painting, I wanted to show off the insect's role as a mount as well as its scale and environment. This meant I needed to incorporate the rider into the composition as well, and I tried to keep in mind that the insect should be the dominant figure while I was thumbnailing, and that it shouldn't be overshadowed by the human figure, as well as other compositional rules.

Thumbnails

I realised that in choosing a desert environment there was a natural amount of blue/orange contrast I could take advantage of, and I tried to have the insect's colour scheme follow those colours, keeping orange-reds on the top half and grey-blues on the bottom. In hindsight, I might have rethought dressing my human characters in white, as the eye is drawn to those very light values instead of the darker ones I used for the insect. Despite that, I think that this works very well to showcase the design and I am pleased with how it turned out, especially considering painted backgrounds are an area I have less experience with.

Final painted concept