A change of tack

So, I know the name of the game was supposed to be "keep ploughing forward" but that ideal wasn't terribly useful when I was hitting feldspar.

I did the rightmost guy first, using the same block shading method. But I just couldn't summon any motivation to do the others. On the one hand i think I failed to come up with interesting colour schemes here. On the other I might just have OD'd on amateurish block shading. In any case, I tried something different on the other two.

Rather than worrying about light sources, I embraced the flat cartoon look of the veeps and did a sort of graduated fill, darkening towards the bottom to draw attention upwards. I'd pondered using this method at the start, but (lazily) never actually tried it. I'm not sure what to make of the end result, but it was very fast and a fun break. Trying new things is good.

It's not actually a graduated fill - instead it's multiple passes with a low-opacity brush of a different colour (hence the banding). But that's not important. Middle guy I carefully selected the shades to work down to. Leftmost I used a universal grey-purple shadow colour. And as a result the one has no contrast and the other is way too dull and dark. But there might be potential here.

I kept working on linearts while i was trying not to finish colouring the monks. Heralds!

I expected difficulty making meaningful variants, but it flowed pretty easily in the end. The tabard designs were fun and they could look nice with some bright heraldic colours on them.

I think these guys might be part of another themed group like the (neglected) brine mutants and the psycho surgeons. Some kind of knights, squires and chivalry thing. I can think of two acceptable armoured knights I've done in the past that could be purposed for that. I've avoided making variations for old veeps so far because I wanted to be making new stuff rather than going over old stuff, but it remains an option.

Speaking of redoing old stuff - trivia time! The heralds were me idly re-doodling one of the veeps I drew way back when I first started playing around with vector stickmen. Of course looking back now they're all abominable, but there's brain fodder to be had there. The cutthroats from a little while back were another example of trying to modernise one of the original bunch.

I've deviated a fair bit from the original idea. I'd wanted to see how few lines you needed to make something identifiable. Which is how I came up with the basic skeleton pattern. But I've gone the way of packing in more detail instead, with the minimal lines thing being just a stylistic quirk.