Revised vine golem

Flashback to May 2009. That vine golem's cute, but the flowers have far too much linework, the shapes don't flow quite right and the colouring is muddy. It needs a revamp.

That's more like it. I think the biggest problem with the old version was the line density. I did a lot of small things to improve the ratio of lines to open space. The flowers were dialed way back, trusting in the colouring to give them definition. The mask is redone and made to contribute to the 3d flow of the pose.

I decided some of the vine twirlies were unnecessary and removed them. A lot of the body lines were tweaked and separated slightly to make sure there was more body than outline.

I made up for all the lost texture with the colouring, now that I'm "allowed" to use detail shading. Much more vivid and tropical now too. It has most of what I liked about the original, but updated to my current standards.

I don't think I'll be giving this treatment to all of my old ones, but this particular one was drawn to my attention and it was nagging at me.

Rotten eggland

A random biro doodle made good.

I was pretty sure this would be a simple throwaway without any depth, but somehow it ended up a full variant set with a surprising amount of modability. The colours helped a lot too, going on easy and with great effect (in my humble view).

I'm sure anyone who knows anything about actual monkeys will be shocked by the proportions and colour schemes ("gibbons don't have tails!") but I have the benefit of ignorance.

The starting point was giving bulk to the forearm to signify "ape". That and the curly tail was enough to sell the basic skeleton to me.

The turning point was deciding to ornament them with the same style as the island natives. Nothing too grand; armbands here, a mask there. The point was to make these look like they'd been adopted by the people.

I intended them to be throwing rotten fruits, but I ended up diversifying. #1's melon is probably just heavy. #3's egg could be more defined - the drippy yolk doesn't stand out well enough but is too incidental to outline, and the crack steals too much attention I think.

But overall a success. Certainly better than I expected from something I started just as a distraction from the thing I was trying to draw.

Phrase of the day: monkey poison.

They are snakes

Limbless slithery reptiles with forked tongues, milky eyes, dry skin and ice-lolly-like tropical colourings.

Snakes.

This critter is mostly blank space, so I was forced to use some texture. I think it ended up ok. Only two levels to it, so it doesn't seem out of place next to the flat shading.

Top left was the original. The rest are hue-shifts (obviously). Top right is my favourite, with just the right amount of contrast. Also I never would have picked that colour for the tongue, but it works nicely. Seablue's tongue is also pleasing.

The hue shifts are just me playing around, seeing what looks best. Only the top right snake is the "real" thing. I'm still avoiding palette swaps.

As far as the linework goes, I don't think the snake's body lines up properly. I feel that this should bother me more than it does. I saw a quote recently - "Build it wrong, but build it." I'm doing that.

Trivialities: the forked tongue is squared off. I had to to get the right shape without too many nodes. I'm thinking of changing the corner style to rounded to avoid this. I'll lose sharp points, but I'll be able to use much shallower angles without getting ugly square ends. I suppose I could change the corner style case-by-case, but once I start doing that I'll be varying line widths and who knows where I'd end up.

Arbitrary restrictions. Woo.

Talent scouts

I thought i was done with the jungle natives but here's another one. These guys like to take and carry around some rather grizzly trophies. If the level of detail allowed, they'd probably be wearing strings of ears. Perhaps these trophy takers are the ones that keep the fetish wards all fresh and scary-looking.

I did a lot of passes on these to get the node count down. Those fur-things on their shoulders were a particular bother. The masks here are pretty simplistic, but I'm ok with that for a bit of variety. I was thinking of monkey island's cannibals when I coloured them, so the one on the left will forever be Lemon-Head to me.

It was difficult to make three different trophy heads. It wasn't long before I gave up and just made two of them skulls - I know skulls aren't meant to have hair, but maybe they're actually dried heads. Besides, skulls look good with scraggly hair. The line coming down from lemon head's trophy is meant to be a string of blood or drool - not sure if that comes across right.

There turned out to be a lot of switchable elements on these guys. Masks, trousers, feet, knife, shoulder and trophy. If I want to keep things under control I'll call the feet and trousers the same element and maybe pair shoulders with masks.

Something else I did recently was come up with some variants for my monster fish-guy. Just head-swaps, but I'm not unhappy with them.

I pondered giving the middle one a dangl- glowy thing - it is meant to be a deep-sea gribbly fish after all - but was happy with its appearance and decided not to overcomplicate things. Shark guy I waffled over; for a while I was wondering whether it looked too much like a monster with a shark-for-a-head rather than a monster with a shark's head.

But yes. Variations. Even if there's no body details I can easily vary without redrawing the whole thing, the head swaps work ok. I'm calling them a success, even if the original is still my favourite.

More rumbling

Once again I somehow manage to proceed according to plan. Big, strong-looking guys in mask-shaped armour. I left these the other night thinking I'd have to redo them - wasn't happy with the weird gauntlet things even after a few revisions. but coming back to them with fresh eyes (and thanks to a second opinion) decided that they were good enough.

The colour on the other hand.... colouring these jungle guys is difficult. I want lots of nice bright painted areas on wood, but it's not coming out right. I want them garish, but it's not working. I might try narrowing the range of colour on each individual - for example, blue-greens with red contrast. Two or three complementary shades and a contrasting detail colour. Maybe that'll work. Meantime they're not awful, just... off.

I also managed to sketch up another jungle guy. Some kind of sneaky ambushy jumps-out-of-trees guy judging from the pose. The ruff things are meant to be pelts or cloaks of leaves/feathers around their shoulders that are going all floofy from the motion. I had this idea in my head that the cloak and the mask are meant to draw attention away from the limbs, making them look like floating demon heads when they leap down and attack.

I think I've settled on that as a theme for these jungle guys - fear. The masks, like the fetish wards are meant to intimidate, so it makes sense that a large part of how they deal with interlopers is psychological. It also matches up with how scary inhabited jungles are commonly portrayed in other media.

It's probably a little late to come up with a theme when I've already done a startling number of these jungle guys, but I found it satisfying to finally put my finger on it. "Fear" is certainly a lot better than some laughably generic spiritualist mishmash. I may be happy with cliché collage for the pictures, but I like to be at least a little original with the concepting.

If I compare to the hospital and creepy sea-cult set, I've actually got a fair number of jungle guys. Spear guys, sword+shield guys, skull staff guys, hulking guys and scary knife-guys. Five not even counting the kind-of cheaty fetish wards and the vine monster. Just missing a boss-type guy. I guess padding out the ranks didn't end up being a problem. I'll shelve the unenthusiastic-looking gorilla for now. And the dinosaurs can be for further into this jungle, or a different place entirely. No need to dilute.

Kinky

I suppose these are properly props rather than creatures, but I see them being used in much the same way and it's good to expand.

I was wary of them being cheap and sloppy-looking compared to the characters. I took several passes throwing away dodgy-looking elements and adding more details like the dead animals. At one point I had a hanging skull and ribcage, but it just didn't look right. I have a method for doing ok skeletons in the stick figure style, but in the context of the wards it wasn't obvious what you were meant to be seeing. There's very little room for me to be stylised on these so I focused on making the masks bright and chunky, and keeping the skulls low-node.

In case it's not obvious, these are meant to be some kind of territory marker. I guess they'd have a variety of useful effects like inspiring allies or terrifying enemies. They may or may not be magical. I don't see myself doing a lot of prop-type enemies. These felt right though. Maybe for a reason as silly as having a face.

I also recoloured the witch doctors. They were too dull; I wanted them brighter and showier. Still not hugely happy with them to be honest, but not sure what needs to be done. Maybe they're still too unsaturated after all.

Embarassingly, I've run out of decent ideas for jungle peeps. I've got spear guys, sword+shielders, witch doctors, fetish totems and a vine golem. Is that enough? I could lump the dinosaurs in with them I suppose. Drummers maybe? If I can come up with an interesting pose. Carnivorous plants? Some kind of triffid? Maybe it's time to just go back to doodling randomly until I happen upon a new theme.

Hmm, maybe if I could come up with a nice style of armour, based on the mask shapes, I could do a jungle juggernaut character. Worth scribbling I think.

A picture jungle

Inexplicably, I made good on my plans. Witch doctors. These are the first jungle natives I've done in colour. I'd been seeing the masks all bright and colourful in my mind's eye, but for these shaman that seems wrong. Bone white it is then. That also helps make them stand out.

That's a problem with that kind of closed pose you see - all the details overlap and it looks messy. Even making a deliberate effort to keep the torsos naked and featureless, the arms and staff crossing the front divides a lot of areas in a distracting way. The masks needed to be striking.

I'm not sure why I did it, but i like the strong red in the skin tones I've got here. I think I'll carry that across all the natives. It can vary from light to dark, but I'll try and keep them all looking ruddy. It could be some kind of decoration or just the local look.

Also had some unexpected luck doodling a jungle golem. I was pondering what sort of motifs these natives might have and I liked the idea of vines and flowers. That and trying to doodle a kind of jungle scarecrow gave me this very swooshy vine monster. I imagine it's animated by some kind of magic in the mask.

No variants here for the same reason as previous monsters. Not much I can easily vary. The mask I suppose, but that on its own wouldn't be enough. I'm not sure that the curling bits of creeper and blossom give me enough to work with either. To be honest I'm not terribly motivated to even try right now - I'm happy with it on its own. It's got an unstrung puppet look about it that I'm fond of.

Native sworders

These go along with the spear-guys from a little while ago, obviously. Once agan they're an eclectic mish-mash. The big chunky masks are shields this time (and a different style) and the weapons are Aztec-styled for no better reason than me liking the look.

Shields are hard to do because the obscure so much of the figure. In this case, they're also at a really weird angle. Probably best not to think too hard about it.

The shaggy furs/feathers/pelts too are rather all-over-the-place. I'm only really content with them on #1. But the rest are good enough.

Lots of poor node discipline here - I've slipped into bad habits. I can't quite bring myself to care enough to revise them though. Done is done. The hairdos and #1's weapon are borderline, but the shoulder-pelt things are where I really let it all go. If I come back to them I'll probably be pruning there. The masks are node-whores too, but there's not really any way around that when they're the focal point of the character.

The pose is progress though. Something other than just standing in generic hero pose. More action is good. I'm not yet at the point where I'm reskinning old skeletons, though as ever it remains a possibility.

Hungry natives

So, colouring is still not really happening. Which is bad. But I'm still puttering along, which is ok.

Here's some culturally ambiguous, miscellaneously exotic jungle/island indigenous peoples. Please note that for maximum offensive cultural stereotyping they are even waving spears.

The pseudo-tiki masks were fun to do. It's a shame that I only do three variants because doing a bunch of different masks could be really fun. Maybe I'll get a chance if I come up with another "native" type. I'm not entirely sure what I was thinking regarding the shape of #3's mask - soemthing about the angle making the fourth corner seem to disappear? Too scared that I'll cause knock-on problems to the face design if I try and fix it.

I had so much fun with the big masks and crazy hair that I had difficulties differentiating them elsewhere. Copped out on the spears - they all have the same head, just different decoration. I was originally thinking I could totally change the weapons so one had a spear, one a sword, one a club (or whatever) but I oculdn't get the pose to work with non-spear weaponry without straying over the edge of the frame.

Also: dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are hard - their body shapes don't like to fit in small square spaces.

The leftmost one I did a while back. I think I might need to colour him before I can decide whether or not he's worthy - I like the idea of the pose but I just can't judge whether I pulled it off or not. Also he has cheapo mirrored feet, which I probably ought to redo.

Death-chicken was more recent and while I don't like him as much as lefty, I'm happier with him. He also has more fiddly details that I could biddle with for variants - mouth and crest mainly. Lefty's got a nice simple look going, but that limits the possibility for tweaks.

They've both got those dromaesaur claws going on. Now I'm thinking that the left guy would look better without them. Thing is that they're nice easy, identifiable and node-cheap foot detail. Low hanging fruit.

I imagine these dinos live in the same jungle-riverish area as the natives above. Pretty generic I know, but maybe I'll come up with some kind of twist later.