Carrion Colours

Don't mind me. Just playing around with colouring for the Carrion. Much easier to do this with vector-colours.

Vector Carrion

I've been experimenting with vector colouring. Normally I export the lines into Photoshop and then colour them there. Flood fills under a multiply layer make life fairly easy. I've been getting more and more comfortable with Inkscape though and the colouring jobs I'm doing are getting fiddlier and fiddlier. So I tried a thing.

I think I like it. It means I have to do some things differently - I have to delete line sections that I want to be invisible (I used to just hide them behind white shapes). So it's a good idea to keep a source copy of the linework so i don't have to reconstruct it if I decide to make changes. Not an enormous bother.

It suddenly occurs to me that they look like a Pokémon evolutionary line in this picture. Oh dear.

The long pointy arcs of colour are much easier as vectors, which is handy because I found myself doing those a lot. Other shapes are harder - I wanted to tear my hair out putting the highlights on those intestines. The hulk and the titan have more detail than just about anything else I've done though. I wanted to test it with something meaty (no pun intended).

I've also scaled them differently. I used to use a fixed square as my scale guide, fitting everything inside it. This had the odd effect of making people holding their arms above their heads shorter than people standing upright. I'm now going to allow them to have different sizes as appropriate, and scale human figures to each other. Line thickness will stay absolute, so larger creatures will look like they have thinner lines, and all human-size figures will have the same relative line thickness.

Toyed with making another leap to variable line thickness and maybe even abandoning the flat ground-line, but decided against it for now.  For now. Also pondered giving proper hands to people. Again, not yet...


Oh yeah - the leftmost guy is new. He's a carrion zombie. Zombies are pretty boring, but I felt that this theme needed a human-scale something. I may have felt wrong. He was a valuable prototype though. Working out how to do a human-scale ribcage was a big problem and I'm not sure I've got the right answer yet. I used so much colour detail that the lines are obscured anyway.

I'm not sure I'm going to do more Carrion. They're meant to be ancient skeletons slowly re-clothing themselves in flesh. With strange masks. Not sure where else I could go. Differently proportioned figures? Not enthusiastic yet - these are cool on their own.

Carrion Hulk

This is a carrion hulk, an attempt at making non-generic undead. Ribcages and facelessness are good visual foci. Especially given how my normal figures don't have mouths - I can go with the flow rather than against it and then have the ribs as surrogate teeth.

This guy is either the corpse of a giant, or perhaps a monstrous product of necroscientific grafting. The silhouette was inspired by some concept art for Shadow Of The Colossus. I felt really good about the sketch and was genuinely excited to get it finished. It needed some tweaking of course. The legs were originally stick-figure but it looked too much like a person wearing a zombie torso (which isn't a bad idea for a future drawing...) and giving them bulk also gave me room for more muscle detail.

When it came to colouring I was thinking about Shingeki no Kyojin and its giants with their "half-baked" biology. I don't have the chops to match that level of anatomical accuracy, but it was an important inspiration.

I think my colours need to be redone. There's no area on this figure that doesn't have detail shading. That's not necessarily bad, but to keep it in the right style I need to be careful to keep it all sharply defined. The back is looking good (though I should have used more bone-colour instead of light flesh for the ribs coming off the spine). The chest ribs though are far too messy - you can tell that's where I started. By the time I got to the hands and feet I had a much better idea of how to achieve the look I wanted.

The fingers on the right hand are too small. I made a halfhearted effort at redoing the hand to be splayed against the ground, but didn't meet any success. In the meantime I can just about convince myself that they're dug into the ground, or curled up out of view, but honestly I need to man up and fix them.

Still I'm proud of this. It's the most complicated thing I've tried for a while and it turned out better than I'd hoped. Go me.

Angry kiln

Not sold on the name, but he's a clay golem with a fire in his belly. Fire belly? Kiln-gut? Chamber core? The pot that walks?

It's meant to look like his body is malleable clay with the head amorphously twisting out of it. His hands (on the other hand...) he's baked in his belly until they're hard. I think the legs are pre-baked to withstand the kiln's weight and heat.

I want the head to be the soft part, so maybe I shouldn't have put the fire in his eye. And his fingers appear to be spoons. I tried a variety of shapes for the fingers, but theses are what worked best so I went with them.

The blue shape behind him is... well I don't know what it is but it makes him present a little nicer I think. There's probably a name for them that I don't know of. Better than a zoom layer and doesn't require actual effort like a background would.

I've had the "internal furnace" idea for a while. My first try was this burly architect but he looked better as a strange alien. Glad I finally got a furnace-belly done finally - I like the imagery.

I'm pelased with the shape of his body. The sketch started out as exploring those curvy hips and stubby legs. The slightly pointed shoulders made me think of clay and so I added the head and then the belly.

Moderate success!

Gilamander

 You see it is a lizard-looking amphibian with poisonous spittle so it is like a salamander but also a gila monster. Subtle, eh?

I'm not sure about the eyes. They're a little bug-out-y. Also an odd colour. They match the bile toad in style though.

He has cute little T-rex arms. The right arm stands out nicely against the belly, but the left gets a little lost.

I think the bulging cheeks and dribble makes it obvious that he's a spitter. I like that.

It took me a while to get the patterns on his tail right. I wanted the last stripe to break a little and serve as a trransition to the mottle-y stripes on the main body, but it looked awful. Plain rings on the tail worked better than I'd expected, so I did that instead.

Glam imp rockers

This is my idea of a productive Saturday morning. Glam imps! I've had it in the back of my mind for a while that imps may be imbecilic pyrotechnicians, but they're also badass musicians. These are closer to human-proportion than their kin, but it was necessary for the pose. Maybe it's the drugs and rock&roll lifestyle that turns them lanky. I'm happy enough with these that it makes me want to make the rock/metal aesthetic the imps' thing.

I'm happy with the basic guitar template. I think it has just enough lines to evoke, without getting too caught up in the details. The tuning screws in particular. While I was colouring them, they didn't really take off until I decided that #2's long flowing hair needed to be bright pink, and realised that the guitars needed to be brightly patterned. After that it all fell into place.

#3's "hair" is weird. But not in a bad way. It's either shiny nylonish fur or stage-FX fire. Either way it looks cool enough. #1's squinty eyes are cute, and I like to imagine his outfit is a little metallic.

It's been longer than I realised since I last did a proper trio with interchangeable parts. Hair/wings, eyes, gloves, torso, guitar body, guitar head, tail tip. Now that's modular!

Also I tweaked the hydrocore to be lighter. Looks more vivid now I think.

Hydrocore

Meet the hydrocore. I like elementals, but I'm trying to make them more interesting by not making them "pure". For example, the pyrovile isn't just made of fire, he has a skeleton. The zephyr king is... is... ok he's pretty generic. That's why hydrocore has a fleshy eye and a strange heart-organ.

He took for fucking ever to colour. I feel it was worth it though, I stepped up my game for him and the colours make him four times better than his linework. I was tired at the end when I did the splash of foam he's sprouting from, but I think that's passable.

The pose isn't perfect but all in all I'm pretty happy. I guess he could be brighter - the linework blends into the dark areas a bit.

I don't have a theme for him to live in. I just did a sketch and I liked it enough to complete it. I guess he could go with the brine cultists, but I'm not keen. Something will turn up.

Now I'm going to try and do some more architects.

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.

Bile toad and soldier bug

Once again I've produced monsters with no variants. Oh I'm history's greatest monster.


Both of these are old line work tarted up a little. I've been going through old WiP sketch pages and trying to rescue abandoned bits with potential. It's nifty that there's a decent stock to be plundered there. It makes me happy that I'm actually producing this volume of stuff. There's some saying about how it's impossible to do the same thing three-hundred times and not get better at it. It's cool to go back to failures now I'm better less crap.

The amphibious thing is a bile toad. I know it's not a toad, but I like the name. I don't think it's diseased - the "bile" is natural toxin that's expelled through the skin and drool. I am very pleased with the milky eyes. I wonder whether I could do a worthy variant with exactly the same linework, but losing the warts.

The soldier bug was briefly a bug soldier. But bug soldier sounds like a description, while a soldier bug is a name. I used the detail here to add depth and definition to shapes, sticking my middle finger up at a consistent light source. Also to make the pointy bits look sharp. Colours suffered some twiddling when I realised that the pale face and colourful horns/carapace made him look like a clown. I couldn't unsee it. I can live with the current incarnation.

Lunacy

I didn't want a brown werewolf. So apparently they're green now. That works for me. The grey-blue has the actual colours I worked with, but I liked the hue shift to green so much that he's become the definitive one. I love hue-shifting. So useful. It brings out colours and combinations I never would have thought of using. And they usually look a good deal more natural than what I drag out of the palette on my own.

The green works well though. I imagine the werewolf being part of the forest witch theme. His name is Gordon for some reason. Perhaps he's a not-virtuous-enough knight "blessed" by the moon to protect the wilds.


When I was playing with the colours I tried colouring the hair as fire. It didn't work. But it was fantastic as an autumn scheme. I'm going to have to try that in the future, maybe as a subtheme. I bet it would look great on the green men. A summer lineup and an autumn lineup would be aces. Maybe a spring one too, or would that be pushing it?

Yesterday I gave up in frustration over the left hand. I couldn't get the linework right. This morning I resolved to fix it no matter what, and opened it up to find it perfectly ok. Maybe I was tired and over-thinking it, or maybe brownies fixed it in the night. Either-or. Ok admittedly the hands are pretty crappy, but better is the enemy of done and I've found it easier for me to improve if I just move on and do better next time.


I tried too long to give him a mouth, but eventually I resigned myself to the fact that he looks pretty damn cool without one. The lack of a cliché snarl also makes him seem more "noble savage" than "frenzied horror", which works for the theme. My remaining concern is the feet. It would make sense that you can't see all his toes on one foot if he's stalking sideways, but I'm not sure that reads right on the drawing.

I am particularly happy with the colouring. I dithered over particulars for ages, but I think I've ended up giving him character without too much unnecessary detail.

Incendiary

I named this fellow Pyrovile. I like this name. I started him and the imps below yonks ago, and just now got round to finishing them.

I dithered a lot over how to do his "skeleton". I think this is as close as I'm going to get to what I want without breaking the node-budget. He originally had arm bones, but this made the hands look more like random flames (odd), so I took them out.

Things I am pleased with:
The twisted flow of fire at his base.
The little bulge of fire around his skull
The way his left eye breaks the edge of the skull-shape.
The name, pyrovile. Pyrovile.

The colouring I have mixed feelings about. It's quite a bit messier than I want, but it's not terrible. I was going for the same effect as I used on the wicker man, but I think it worked a lot better there. I might need to get a new fire technique for the infernals. I don't think I want them as clean as the firefox, but this lots-of-dots method seems too embery. There's probably a nice middle ground, or maybe I'll just get better at executing this style.

A little less fierce-looking are these imps. Little arsonists trying to look innocent. They're based on a goblin/imp pattern I used with my very first primitive vector stick figures. The main changes are the cloven hoofs and the ears.

For the fire, see what I said about Pyrovile.

Trivia!

The ears were originally horns. Eventually decided to go for ears because I could do more varieties. And it's easier to make ears that evoke horns (as seen on the first two) than vice versa.

I agonised over whether the extra lines to make those cloven hooves were worth it. Agonised! I'm glad I did it though - it's a new kind of detail and it adds a lot.Besides, they're so simple they needed a little extra something.

I'm still not sure about the variety in their incendiary methods. Fireball is a little different conceptually to molotov or bomb in my mind. If I ever put them to work, I may need to revise them so that they're all obviously the same class. For now they're just shy of my "bothered to fix" threshold.