Winter break: 3 weeks’ worth of work. Minor Project:

Winter break: 3 weeks’ worth of work. Minor Project:

In the winter break I had to complete this check list:

1. Complete Sy, Gy or Ty armour design.

2. Digitalize the city design.

3. Digitalize the power structures in the society.

4. Try to recreate a better version of Violet character sheet.

5. If I had time complete Gin design.

6. Create a blog post with all the research on it.

7. Be more thoughtful on how I write my blog posts.

Note:

I have been considering transferring into creating the character design onto watercolour paper, see below:

1. 
   

1. 
   

I do not particularly like them as much as I thought I would. I am dropping this, and I will keep going with the digital art medium.

Digitalize the city design:

To digitalize the city I used the already established city structure I did on my sketch book:

1. 
   

I proceeded to pass it on photoshop and with a bit of a struggle I was finally able to create a colour-coded city structure which made more sense than the previous one.

1. 
   

My thought process behind the city structure was initially inspired by a picture I saw two years ago of a city in space which was a cupola that had inside a weird structure and people dressed all the same going about their day on a giant ant and the Pentagon or Octagon prison introduced in CTS1 lectures, Utopia and Dystopia then from Surveillance. The second one hit hard on me as I am a stressed and paranoid person as is, and I had the perfect story to include these feeling in. So the city being a circle and cupola-looking is a fairly old concept, but it was made better from the research I’ve done this year. Looking into dystopian cities, a lot had to do with how controlled everything is, and how the society is so cruel that makes even good people act out. On the other hand, I looked at how utopian cities are constructed too, I wanted the dread not to be immediately apparent, it is only if the audience looks close enough that they will see the how dystopian everything is, so the city is full of green, can survive on its own and is aesthetically pleasing; but is also completely surveilled, is divided in sections, the walls are so high that people cannot see outside them. Hunger Games gave the inspiration that each city had a specific job to do. The one in question is a blacksmith city, as it is quite unusual and, in a way, contradictory, as blacksmithing now is more considered an art, something people do to create unique and priceless objects. While in the city is necessary and somewhat mundane.

I tried to create little sips of how each section of the city will look like. This failed miserably: I need more training and more research on how to create good backgrounds, which I currently do not have enough time to complete for this project, which is a shame, it would have been nice to have little illustrations to show how I am imagining these things. I am currently sitting on pictures I took for my archive of landscapes I like from my travel to where I used to live from 3 or 6 years ago, London and I believe Oxford, which I tried to modify them into something I could use. See below the failed attempts.

1. 
   

I decided to cut my losses and focus on the character design which I believe needed more attention.

Complete Sy, Gy or Ty’s armour design.

I decided to focus on Sy’s character design for a few reasons: the first is because Sy is the one in charge of the city Violet, the protagonist, currently lives in, and is the one I wanted to create the most in general because she is a big part and threat towards the protagonists in the story.

I did go off the deep end on creating new things that had nothing to do with her previously, I decided to go back to the first- and second-character design I did for her and then look into the new armour bits I did just before entering winter break.

1. 
   

1. 
   

1. 
   

My mum’s and sister’s feedback on the previous armours was that they looked plain: that it did not show rank. Which I agree with: usually in history or in sci-fi high ranking general had something that made them look different that the normal troops, at first my idea was that all three had the whole armour in one shade, but their ideas made more sense. They also pointed out that the helmet looked awful and not very sci-fi looking.

This problem was resolved with the arrival of this video: (put the League of Legend video.) Her helmet was so cool! And the fact that the music rhythm was on it was eye opening! Truth be told I did have this revelation in the last week of Uni, but I believe I forgot to mention this.

This idea would make it easy to know who is talking in a visual manner, which I am extremely fond of.

The other helmet is a revised version of Gin’s old helmet with an accent inspired by different Sci-Fi movies, such as Alita and Tron.

The other problem was colours, I had to think about it awhile, but I eventually come up with the idea that each one whom has power will carry a colour, just like the imperials hold one: Orange, Green and Purple, which are secondary colours, this impacted my decision on giving them primary colours: red, yellow and blue. Another reason was that red has always been the eyes colour of the royal family since the first draft of the story, so I wanted to keep it that way.

The choice now was to give the three general yellow or blue, and with this I started creating, at first only two then three, sketches to publish on Discord, ask to my friend and family to vote on. See them below.

Votes were given, and N.3 Blue won the competition.

Problem: Photoshop is not working properly, I do not have a clue why, I uninstalled and installed it twice but there is no sign for me to work effectively without having a “couldn’t save” pop up in my face, this greatly irritating me. It made all of this part of the project hell and it took twice the time to finish these, frankly I am livid beyond belief, as this setback made me late enough to be unable to complete Violet fixed design, the protagonist of the story. To avoid further headaches I set to find a new way of creating the character design (Illustrator is out of the question as I do not like how it works, especially the brush tool which I use in creating illustrations.) I stumbled upon Krita, which is a tool created by professional digital artists for people who cannot afford big tools such as Photoshop or Studio Clip. Here is the link if you are interested: With this new software I begun to work on the final design for Sy:

Krita, was a blessing in disguise for shading: I love so much the watercolour-like shading was already in it; I did not have to scour the internet for cool brushes like I did for Photoshop, which was a relief as I felt like I was not working fast enough as is. It was a nice throwback to how I usually paint the character design I make in watercolours.

Let me walk through my design choices:

The helmet, like I mentioned before, was inspired by a League of Legends video. (side note, this is funny to me because I created Lin’s mask the same way) As I mentioned before I wanted the helmet to show a line if she was talking, this line was inspired by the heartbeat machine found in hospitals.

The armour design is the second design I made but with a ‘break’ in the abdomen region, where the blue meets the white, for better mobility, the cape was initially inspired by Lotor from Voltron Legendary Defenders but modified to look less stuffy for mobility sake.

The Wings: This was inspired by and extremely old concept I had for Sy, where she could fly. I found it a shame that I scrapped the idea, as it would have made the character more fearsome, which is what I wanted. The idea of the formation of wings like these comes from Voltron Legendary Defenders once again, to be precise Zarcon’s armour when battling Voltron and the Black Lion’s full wings.

The Hands: This at first was a mistake by my part, but I found it too cool to fix it, as without it, it might give the wrong idea to the audience and make them believe she is human. As for the mechanism: this was inspired by Spiderman Morales villains that could form their weapons from nowhere. This concept already existed in my story too, as another character has a pentagon shaped thingy that is a storage room. So I decided to put the same tech in her hand.

The Description: I didn’t want any names given to Sy, this is because in the city prospective, and in Violet’s, Sy is supposed to be this powerful force, that is immortal. Sy relishes in this power, so she does not discloses to anyone but the King her actual identity, and I wanted that to show here too. The year is XXXX as I have not decided on the date I want to set my universe in, and I feel like it appears a lot in fanfiction and webcomics, and it feels less restrictive that way. I also wanted Sy to have a more rounded personality to be just a power hungry and disciplinary person, so I added the singing part and the fact that she likes dogs and dislikes paper work.

The typeface: this is a weird one. This was more of a coincidence. I did not like how the other type looked like, the one I used for Violet a while back, so I decided to change it up and I stumbled onto this one. This reminded me on the little detail on how the text looked like in Coraline’s father’s computer, and I liked it, and it feels so cyber-like, so I decided it suited the aesthetics and used it.

Try to recreate a better version of Violet Character sheet

This part was completely screwed over by the fact that Photoshop did not work properly. I started her new character design page twice and had to abandon ship both times. Like I mentioned before I am livid about this as I am extremely behind on the project.

The ‘skeleton’ from before made violet look weird and noting how much better Sy looked than my usual style of drawing I decided to be a bit more realistic in the body shaping. I decided to use myself as figure, as stated many times Violet is somewhat based on me. This brought me a problem: Violet dress I choose to make looks absolutely awful on my body structure, I tried to make the body structure a bit more like the previous one, but it just does not work. The result is to change a bit the dress: removing the shoulder puff and making the skirt longer was a good fix. Violet still looks a bit uncomfortable in the dress, which is not as bad as it sounds, as she is supposed not to like the dress. Here is as far as I got while I am writing this.

I have not much else to say. This will be my next step in the project.

If I have time complete Gin design.

Gin ended up in the back burner, but I wanted to share this work I already completed for his character design I was not able to post:

The helmets are mostly inspired by DC’s Red Hood and Marvel’s Iron Man and Tron helmets.

I do not have much to say as I did not put much thought as these were done in an early stage of experimentation which was stopped by me going in the deep end in creating not well thought out characters.

Digitalize the power Structure in society.

The pictures below show the structure of the society I come up with work in lose terms.

I did not want to focus much on the politics of the story as I believe these are not important, but they do give a good idea of the social structure for the audience. This is very rough, and it might shift over time to make a better power structure. For now this is as good at it can be.

The research blog post.

This is currently being written as I am a bit behind on schedule.