Posts Tagged ‘roleplaying’

Critical Role – A Day at the Festival

Tuesday, May 8th, 2018

I’ve been away from this blog for so long that I’ve never mentioned Critical Role here? Gosh golly.

Critical Role is a show in which “nerdy ass” voice actors play Dungeons & Dragons. It’s probably the most famous one in what is now a fairly popular genre of shows/podcasts called Actual Play – good old tabletop roleplaying games, recorded for an audience. Critical Role has been running for several years, but started a new campaign only a few months ago, with new characters going on fresh adventures; an excellent entry point to join the fun without watching hundreds of hours of the previous story.

I was excited for this campaign to start because I wanted to finally follow the story as it airs, and join the MASSIVE online community of amazing fan artists. This show inspires some gorgeous fanart, from hyper realistic landscapes to epic battle illustrations to silly comics. Every new episode spawns dozens if not hundreds of doodles, drawings and paintings, and IT. IS. AWESOME.

Critical Role - A Day at the Festival

This piece was based on episode 17 , in which the party visits an autumn festival and some hilarities ensue. It was done on the iPad Pro using Procreate, and since I’ve never shown my process on an iPad here before (on account of the last blog update being before touch screens were invented, give or take), this looked like a good opportunity, even though it’s quite similar to how I work with Photoshop. Procreate is a really fantastic app for digital art on the iPad, tailored beautifully for touch gestures and the Apple pencil, and one of its nice features is the automatic video capture of the drawing process. Here’s Yasha the Barbarian to demonstrate things.

Breakup of the process

Yasha - process 1

1. Rough sketch

The video starts with an existing rough sketch, which I doodled in a different document along with the rest of the party and then dragged to a fresh, bigger canvas. Its purpose is to determine composition on the canvas, general pose and espression.

2. Line art

I’m still experimenting with Procreate’s brushes. It has a beautiful range of brushes that come with the app and so many options to tweak them and create new ones which I haven’t dared try yet. For this line art I used “Tara’s Vine Charcoal Sketch”, recommended to me by my friend and Procreate enthusiast Leda Chung. It has a nice sketchy feel, but with some smoothing to it. This stage is about refining the lines and working out the details. It’s where I have to make actual sense of the mess of lines forming the hands, for example, which is why you can see a reference photo magically appearing in the video (0:18).

3. Flat colour

With the line art done, I start colouring. The “flatting” stage is for filling areas with, well, flat colours – the basic colours for each area, before any shading, hue changes, gradients etc.

4. Flat colour foreground

It’s actually a bit more than just flats here – I already added some reddish and pale skin tones on the guy (see #6). They’re in separate layers just to make it easier to change things; if I could separate each and every element in the drawing without losing my place and my mind, I probably would.

Yasha - process 2

5. Background

I went with simple backgrounds for all the illustrations in this series, to give focus to the characters, and because I intended them to fit as mobile wallpapers, where one might want the top to stay clean for icons and stuff. Procreate brushes really came in handy here, helping to create a bit of texture and colour variation without too much effort.

6. Colour variations

Moving back to the characters, I used some textured brushes for their colour touches as well. This is the stage where I add any colours “on top” of the flat one: redness in the face and extremities; makeup; gradients and patterns in hair and clothes etc.

7. Shadow

Just like I do in Photoshop, I add a layer set as Multiply on top of everything, and colour in shadows with a purplish colours.

8. Details

A few final touches in a new layer, for last little highlights, fixes and touches of texture.

Doneso.

You can get all the illustrations as phone wallpapers in the original Twitter thread.

 

Cheers (and, is it Thursday yet?),

Aviv

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Space party, table of seven!

Wednesday, July 12th, 2017

I was recently commissioned by James, an Edge of the Empire GM, to draw his campaign’s party. He runs a game for his two friends and their five children, which is so cool. How does the saying go, a family that harnesses the light side together, stays together?

He sent me descriptions of all of their characters, along with helpful links (because I warned him in advance my Star Wars knowledge is limited to what I’ve learned from the Bacta Basics segments on the Campaign podcast), and we agreed on a police lineup type poster, because they’re a bunch of scoundrels (and I’ve literally *just now* learned that Timothy Zahn’s book “Scoundrels” features the same image style on its cover. So…force-sensitive minds think alike, I guess?).

Here’s the layout I created to make sure I got the body shapes, heights and poses right, and – following James’s approval, the clean sketch.

Edge of the Empire party: layout sketch

Edge of the Empire party: pencil

For colour, James mentioned his friends’ family had a system where each member has their own colour for stuff – water bottles, backpacks etc – so they know what belongs to whom (apparently that’s helpful in a family of seven people). I loved that idea – both for real life and for the poster – and tried to incorporate each person’s colour in a clear, but subtle enough way.

This is what we ended up with, which I hope the party likes! You can read their adventures on their Obsidian Portal adventure log: http://deathfrombelow.obsidianportal.com/adventure-log

Edge of the Empire party: colour

May the Force be forever in your favour!

Aviv

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A Town with Pep

Friday, June 23rd, 2017

I finished the illustration for A Town with Pep – the Riverdale-esque game by Richard Williams – that I showed a process for a few weeks ago. Below are the ink and finished colour stages.

A Town with Pep - ink A Town with Pep - colour

Did you spot the difference (other than, well, one being in full-colour)? After seeing the finished piece, Richard mentioned that for a title illustration for a game called “A Town with Pep”, there’s very little “town” in the artwork. Luckily we found just the right spot to quickly build a little settlement, complete with a small factory that I borrowed from one of the early background references Richard provided. There’s always some pep happening around a factory.

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Objectifying Characters

Wednesday, May 24th, 2017

Much has changed in the year+ since the last post. Well, not MUCH, but one big thing: I’m now a full-time freelance illustrator! My website got a small renovation, which this blog and my Facebook Page should probably share at some point, but if I waited with updates until that was done, well, it might have been another year before the next post.

The reason I decided to become self-employed is that – while I really enjoyed working on Viber sticker packs and being part of that awesome team – I wanted to branch out and do some different things as well. After a little more than a month “on the job”, I can happily say that I’m doing just that.

One project I recently started is an illustration for “A Town with Pep“, an indie RPG from Richard Williams. It’s the first in several projects Richard commissioned, which is great because a) they’re all different and interesting, each in its own way; b) Richard is a client who knows what he wants, knows how to convey that, and still leaves a lot of the creative “reins” in my hands and c) he’s totally cool with me sharing my work in progress. Which is what’s happening now.

A Town with Pep

“A Town with Pep” is a “Teen mystery drama in small-town America”. Think Riverdale in RPG form. Richard commissioned a title illustration featuring 5 teenagers – examples of the characters one might play – and he gave me complete freedom in designing them. But, since complete freedom paralyses me artistically, I asked him to give me some character design “seeds” in the same way a player would start creating a character in the game: picking an object that symbolises the character. Richard sent me these five images of everyday objects. As a little exercise, see what kinds of characters come to your mind before reading on to see my interpretations.

A Town with Pep - Objects

Looking at the objects, I started getting ideas for some of them, and collected references that came to mind from various media (mainly TV). I often do that when coming up with characters for roleplaying games as well, probably because I watch ALL the television and that’s just what my mental library is composed of. After getting a more or less solid idea of each character I drew a quick sketch for each. Are they anything like what you imagine when looking at the objects?

A Town with Pep - character concepts

The next step was tackling the composition of the image. Richard gave me a good reference shot (from Riverdale actually), and I tried two takes on it:

A Town with Pep - composition sketches

#1 was approved, and I moved on to pencilling the scene. During feedback on the first draft, Richard got the idea of showing a “missing” sixth teenager made up of negative space. I like it because it makes the composition more interesting, as well as playing into the sense of mystery this game is all about. Here’s the approved pencil stage.

A Town with Pep - pencils

That’s where we got to so far. Work in progress, whoo!

Aviv

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Merry Christmas!

Friday, December 25th, 2015

It’s customary to upload all holiday-related content before the actual day of Christmas, but this is a whole day when no one works, everything is shut down, and the chance of rain is too high to risk going out for a walk (also, that would involve getting up and going out for a walk), so what better time to compile some recent artwork into a festive blog post?

So first with the Christmas-y stuff: this is a pack I designed and was released for free on Viber as a holiday gift to our users (you can download it now if you have Viber). The idea was to steer away from the usual sugary, kitsch Christmas stickers, and show both sides of the holiday: the annoyingly enthusiastic and the bitterly cynical. I don’t even really celebrate Christmas, but having had my fair share of family dinners, long holidays and festive atmospheres, I could absolutely relate to both.

Viber sticker pack: Christmas Elves

Speaking of festive atmospheres, our two recent posts in Up to Four Players are all about Christmas, from the (quite autobiographical) point of view of foreigners coming into this strange wonderland. I’ve spent three Christmasses here, and I’m still discovering new things; for example, how many times a person can hear the same Christmas song before losing their mind. (Clicking the thumbnails will take you to the full-size strips in Up to Four Players.)

Up to Four Players #50: The Meaning of Christmas Up to Four Players #51: Festive Perspectives

Speaking of players, next Saturday will join several of them, in a 12-hour-long roleplaying marathon for charity. It’s in Hebrew, so if you’re into that sort of language, do check it out. Eran will be running a victorian monster-hunting adventure in the Savage Worlds system, with 3 brave heroes who’ll stick by him throughout the day, and several guest players who’ll pop by for a spell (me included!). I drew portraits of all our characters.
Rippers character portraits

Speaking of guest-appearances, I made one in Leigh Lahav’s recent video about Star Wars’ rising star, BB-8 the robot. I also helped her design some of the characters, but I’m much more excited about my small voice-acting role. See if you can guess which one it is.

Speaking of…umm…roles, I recently sketched the characters from our ongoing roleplaying campaign in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying system. These are, in order: Evyatar’s character Brioche, the slightly crazy religious fanatic; Dassi’s character Marion, the slightly mysterious gold order wizard; and my character Agnes, the slightly criminal apothecary.

Warhammer: Brioche Warhammer: Marion Warhammer: Agnes

I think these are all the segues I can come up with this morning. Have yourselves any kind of very merry holiday that you’re prone to celebrating this time of year, and if perchance I fail to write my “End of 2015” post before the end of 2015, a very happy new year!

Aviv

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