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.