Colour study that invited an old favourite of a character design into itself.

A quick portrait from photo reference.

Mockup of a character introduction frame. Needs to be more dynamic and "in your face", but it's a start.

Portrait practice and trying out new custom brushes. Moondog is currently one of my favourite musical composers!

Beaverkarts

Screenshots from Beaverkarts, a mobile game I worked on at Rust0 Games.

The transition from the big headed goofier design to a more refined and "cuter" beaver.

A little sneak peek to the creative process of character design that in my opinion is the most enjoyable part of creating videogame visuals. You can see some of the scrapped and early versions of Mr Beaver and some facial expressions for the actual game character.

Some icon designs we iterated the final from. Looking back, I kinda like the one with the busier background. Reminds me of older cartoons and their pastel colour palettes.

Value and perspective practice

Done with different graphic pencils of various hardness levels. The paper was just normal printing paper so it got "saturated" and worn really quickly. Need to remember not to use regular paper on works like this since the blacks can't reach enough saturation and the harder pens tear the paper.

Tried some painting today on one of the Ninja sketches of a baboon. I have no idea whether this style would translate well into the actual game, but I had a lot of fun just painting without too many restrictions. Maybe some more cartoony colouring next time.

Just a little peek at how this one older concept came to be. Started as a line drawing and after blocking in the colours I painted it using a regular square brush. This was a challenge called "king of hearts" and now that I look at the concept retrospectively the heart symbolic was toned down way too much in the end.  

Some character design sketches for Ninja. Monkey/Ape guards this time.

Dark Souls II shield design

These were made for the Dark souls 2 shield design contest on facebook. Basically you just get a template corresponding to your region (round for EU) and you can submit them as bitmaps without any descriptions to the page. People vote for the designs and the winners get featured as real shields in the game.

I immediately had the idea of a stretched face based just on the round shape. You can see the progress of my sketching in the first image and then some of the emblems I tried to put into the shield on the second image. It might be too cluttered now and I'm not completely happy with the final result, but one needs to stop refining stuff at some point and make decisions. There are no real highlights in the texture, because I think it might work best like this in the game, with lighting coming from the engine itself.

The finished shield has norse mythology inspired glyphs of human sacrifice. If you want to support the design you can vote for it here.

Concepts for project "Ninja"

The character is one of multiple bosses in my friends game project "Ninja". You can follow the development of Ninja here: http://ninjadevelopment.blogspot.fi/

I started the process by studying wild boars a bit and then translating their physique into a bipedal design seen at the start of the first page. The design needed to be iterated towards a more chunkier look and something more appropriate for 3D modelling purposes. The final two images are closer to target, but still under development. The gear is a bit on the generic side at the moment. The games main character silhouette is there to give perspective on the size of the character.