Wizards too!

By some coincidence, I've not done any magicy-types since I started drawing these guys in triplicate. That run has been interrupted.

I labeled these guys "instructors" for want of a better name. And because something about them makes me think "magic school". That could be an explorable new theme, or they could just as well be generic hero-types.

The poses are pretty boring - facing the camera and largely symmetrical - but I like them enough to ignore that. The high-collared cloaks please me. Really, that was the hook for the initial sketch and I'm glad i could reproduce it for the final linework. The scepters with floaty elements too - I like free-floating parts for magical implements. It's a nice simple thing I can do that adds a lot of interest. Also the hair on #1 and #2. #1's a new way of drawing hair that I experimented with; wispy and messy. I do not dislike it. And #2's silly old man hair worked out nicer than I'd hoped with a very low nodecount.

If I do decide that these are going to be magic school instructors, I'd probably re-colour them to make the cloak look like a uniform. In fact with a large enough pool of magic school characters, I could use multiple colour themes and divide them into houses. That could be cool. Something to think about if I go down that route. But like I said they could also be generics. Robed wizards in general are seldom heavily themed. Like this next batch:

Again, they could be part of the magic school (wand studies perhaps?) or generics. Note the floaty bits on the wands again.

Way back when I started playing with these not-really-stick figures, I came up with a nice way to do wands with a minimal line count. Just a straight line, with a break in it near the top to indicate the white part. I didn't use it for these guys since I wanted to emphasise the wands a bit more, but it'd be good on figures where the wand is incidental or secondary.

Not that I went all out on these wands. What is that, a marshmallow? Then some kind of crystal and a cliché star. The magic school approach would at least justify a lot of cliché. #3's hat for example.

One characteristic of robed wizards is that it's tricky to come up with meaningful variations for the main body without totally wrecking what made the original cool to me. See, they tend to be all one big shape. That's why the three here all have the same, err, don't have the words... "swooshy bits", down the front from the collar. Also, if I do come up with meaningful variation, it has to be swapped out all as one piece. So if I tried to swap parts between these guys, I'd treat the arms and body separately, so any of the robe styles could have sleeves, cuffs or gloves. Probably the shoes too, just to try and break pattern. Now that i look at them again, I wonder if I could swap hats/hair independent of heads... #3's lock might overlap #2's eyebrows in a less-than-attractive way though.

Oh yeah - #2! I want to point out that he's sporting an unprecedented new feature - eyebrows! I don't think I've done those elsewhere. The odd frown line, yes. But not distinct eyebrows. I think. Unless I did them on that old calligrapher or the minister of thamaturgy... I'm going to go check.

Nope! No eyebrows in the archives. This is a bold new advance in veep technology.

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.

Not rocket science

Some victims of eccentric hospital experiments. These ones based around unlocking the potential of the human mind. This particular unlocking either kills you or turns you into a twitching imbecile, but a twitching imbecile with telekinesis!

I started these ages ago with the rest of the hospital guys, but they were crap and so I moved them to my fragments file and forgot about them. Last night I looked them over again and rescued them from awfulness. Now they're mediocre at worst.

#2's collar is unusually 3d. And so I judged it worthy of survival when I was de-awfuling them. The green things are meant to be holding tanks for some noxious chemical. Maybe I should try and make them shiny, or put bubbles in them, or make them partially empty? Something to make it more obvious.

The collars/devices and heads are all independently swappable. I wouldn't have been happy with just the heads, so I'm glad I managed to get another modular detail there. I briefly pondered different styles of manacle and, err, footacle, but decided that that would be reaching.

At the moment my eye is turning towards those natives again. I'd like to expand their ranks a little. Some kind of shaman/witch doctor seems a good move. Maybe totems, idols or fetishes of some kind? I might have a go at some kind of pet triffids or vine monsters. Or whatever. Masks are fun.

Talking about icons

When I was making my icons, I looked at a lot of existing ones for inspiration. Also to steal. I've liked these cute little symbolic graphics ever since I first saw them in Diablo 2, and so I thought I'd blather and over-think them a little. Or at least, the ones whose icons I can easily gaffle from the web.

Diablo 2's icons are all silver silhouettes on brown. They're made to look like they might actually exist in the world as glyphs. There's drop shadow and texture, and the silver symbols don't touch the edge of the glyph plate.

In the game these icons are displayed at a fairly large size, and with few on screen at a time, so they can get away with a lot. And yet they're pretty abstract. This means that while you may not know what a given glyph is meant to represent, you can still recognise it pretty easily in a crowd.

I think that the texturing actually harms the readability of these icons. In areas of high detail, the grey lines on the white confuse the shape slightly. Very visible on the second glyph on the bottom row.

World of Warcraft. Warcraft 3 had almost exactly the same style icons, but they mainly portrayed units and are less interesting to me (though most of them did get recycled into WoW. More on that later).

These icons are actually small illustrations. The icon frames are like windows onto a larger scene, unlike the or symbolic Diablo icons. They also use strong colours and high contrast to make the icons even more distinctive from each other. Necessary, since WoW gives you a bar of relatively small icons to select from and it's easier to pick out colours than shapes at a glance.

This small display size does mean that a lot of the detail is wasted in play and you come to rely on recognizing the colour and rough shape of an icon, often with little thought to what it's a picture of. Still, if you take care to look they do work to illustrate the skill in a way that the Diablo icons don't.

Another problem with these illustrative icons is that they're harder to make. As a result, WoW re-uses a lot of icons for multiple skills and/or items. It's simply too much bother to commission a new piece of art for every single new ability.

Guild wars. Like World of Warcraft, these are fairly illustrative. They have a softer look, less cartoonish but not significantly less stylised. Guild wars also likes to use graduated fills or textures as a backdrop while WoW usually prefers featureless black.

Something Guild Wars does with colour that WoW doesn't, is that each class's skills have a unified palette. If you see a cyan-on-purple icon, you know it's a mesmer skill. Green and chestnut brown = hunter. Like WoW's, you tend to focus on the pattern and colour at display size rather than looking at the illustration, but the unified colour scheme means that your skill bar is cohesive and attractive to look at. Since guild wars characters have access to skills from two classes, this also helps distinguish between them on the skill bar.

Despite Guild Wars' icons being just as complicated as WoW's, it doesn't repeat icons like WoW does. Unfortunately they've chosen quantity over quality. While a lot of the icons, especially the ones from the basic game, are very striking and attractive, others are very obviously under processed photographs. The fourth icon on the second row is a particularly bad example.

When I played Demigod recently, I found its icons particularly problematic. They're fairly attractive illustrations and a unified colour scheme across all of the skill icons makes them pleasing to the eye in a group. Unfortunately they're just far too detailed and with far too little contrast.

On the character's skill bar, displayed at roughly this size and with only four icons to choose between it's no bother selecting the correct one. On the leveling-up page though, they are less than half the size they are here they all become identical brown blurs. You actually have to memorise the position of the skills you want to buy and check the tooltips since the icons are almost no help as reference.

As you can see from my previous post, I decided to go with a stark Diablo-like style for maximum contrast and readability, though my icons are also a little more illustrative than Diablo's glyphs. You can also see where I stole the dummy person silhouette idea from. While I do plan to use colour, I'm following Guild wars' with a very limited colour palette for maximum clarity and also using that colour to convey other information.

In all honesty, my options were also fairly limited by the fact that I lack the ability to draw proper illustrative pictures, but I don' think I'm missing out on much. To my mind, flat high-contrast shapes are the way to go. Readability before illustration. Also, the simplicity of these icons should make it relatively quick easy to come up with a large number of them, hopefully obviating the need for repetition or bad photo manipulations.

Symbolic gesture

I mentioned that I'd gotten into doing icons, yes? Here are an arbitrary sample of the (over 170 now) ones I've done. I've got the idea in my head that these are the skill icons for characters' attacks, to add some visual interest and flavour past the name.

Since they'd be pretty small, I went for clean, distinctive shapes and maximum contrast. They were all draws as white on black background, like the rightmost column here. The coloured ones are experiments. White on black is striking, but boring. Colour adds another axis of interest. I could use it to distinguish two skills with the same icon - an orange potion vs the blue potion, for example. Though for now, icons are fun and easy enough to make that I'm in favour of each skill having its own unique icon.

More likely to my mind is colour-coding them so that, say, default skills are green, conditionals are yellow and specials are orange. Other colours could be used for things like passive traits or I don't know what. Another option would be, rather than a uniform colour key, it varies for flavour. So player characters are always orange yellow green, but maybe the fish cult enemies go blue, cyan, white. Not sure whether there's enough design space there to be worth doing, but I like the idea of local colour schemes.

Speaking of colour, I had grander plans initially. I was going to vary not just the colour of the icon, but the colour of the background too. So I could have yellow on red, white on blue or whatever. However experimentation showed that the vast majority of colour combinations just didn't have enough contrast to look good at small sizes. Even something like red on black proved too difficult to distinguish, hence why it's only bright colours up there. Tinting the background remains an option I suppose; that is, near-black colour shades.

I let myself use a lot more nodes and lines than I do on the veeps themselves. It would have excluded more interesting ideas than it spurred, I think. Besides, the small size and two-tone style provides plenty of restrictions as it is.

I tried to stick to some conventions. The more literal attack icons, whether they're swooshes or weapon icons, travel from the top left to the bottom right. More symbolic icons can stay central. Compare the pierced heart to the target next to it. Both could be icons for the same kind of attack, but the former is representing the attack, while the latter is describing it visually.

I built up a small vocabulary of shapes doing these. Hearts and shields are good - easily recognisable, even if you mangle them a little bit and a cracked or pierced heart or shield has obvious meaning even without a name to go along with it. The little person silhouette is good too. It can make a fine crash test dummy, or I can surround it with auras, halos or what have you.

By and large, these icons were made with no specific purpose in mind beyond looking cool. I decided "I want to do a swooshy thing" or "the ground cracking" or "a splash". Sometimes I had more specific motivations; "something suitable for a beast" gave me the first three in the second row of that picture there. Looking at the brine mutants I made a few tentacles, shells and so on. The big burly insect bruiser was the impetus for some bug-based icons. But I'm using them as springboards rather than wedding myself to any specific plans. I'm making these icons because they're fun to make. Any eventual purpose is unlikely and secondary.

Thugs and brains

Generic dock toughs. They should fit nicely alongside the various sea cultists and mutants in the corrupt port town. Not exactly in line with my plans, but then little ever is.

I think it's the swaggering pose that sells them. They're also nice and simple in the design - a return to form. The lines of the jacket are a bit clumsy still, but you wouldn't know from the final output.

#1 had concerns. His cutlass hilt was a trial and I'm still not happy with it. His hat is fine on its own, but when colouring him any bright colours made him look like a YMCA member. It's probably the bare chest that does it.

Hmm - speaking of bare chests, I've just realised that #1's sling-strap-thing and #3's scar run the same direction. I should probably flip one of them so that it doesn't look like a pattern. #3, most likely, since now that I think about it that kind of scar would likely go top right to lower left, if inflicted by a right-handed opponent.

I also returned to the hospital of horrors. No variants though - I think these are the "boss monsters" of the area. Graft-spiderman's skeleton is too distinctive to reskin and I can't come up with any worthwhile ideas for scalpelwoman.

Spider-guy's really loaded for bear. Bonesaw, scalpels, syringe, trolley, even a cloth for his brow! A surgical genius who decided he could do so much better with an extra pair of hands.

Scalpelina's something I promised I wouldn't so. Leggy woman in heels. I tried so hard to avoid the sexy nurse cliché, but the sketch just... happened. And I liked it. I'm still wavering over whether she's too long and spindly, the leg is a little unconvincing and the swoosh of the coat is bizarre. But nevertheless, I like. At least she's flat-chested. Maybe I'll come back to her tomorrow and, with the benefit of fresh eyes, despair over the anatomy and start over.

Still, I can overlook dumbsexy a little for the sake of a boss character. And I do really like the pose with the scalpel and clipboard. If Dr Spider is the frothing nutjob, she's the obsessive badass. They could each support their own staff, or combine forces in the same hospital. Who can tell. She was originally going to have a fuckoff hypodermic, but that was harder to look cool than I expected. Happier with the scalpel.