David and I sat down last night at a late hour in the night to join pencils and create sketches whilst in the presence of another creative mind; our efforts were not useless. I will not recount his creative experience, for I have oriented this blog on my personal artwork, but I assure you he was just as productive if not more then I was.
I had been brewing the idea of a character body shape sheet for my God Metropolis project for quite some time now and had already tried my hand at it without prevailing; last night though, I got around to a satisfying result. I was able to get five major body shapes for the male human being, these are: slim, average, muscular, chubby and fat. I think it could be cool that a player could choose what corpulence his character has from the start; look at Guild Wars and World of Warcraft and all those popular MMORPGs’ character creation pages, I’ve rarely seen much diversity in body shape; I suppose that’s because designing custom equipment for X number of races and the additional male/female body shapes is quite a bit of work; various body shapes for all these would be terrible, but then again, I’m in no rush. These shapes are only the beginning; I plan on expanding the concept, since I can feel that my style can be found in these shapes, but I also think that I can deepen the styling to make a more caricatured and exaggerated palette, after all, this is my world I’m creating and I don’t see why I should limit myself at all. This is my tip of the day for you aspiring artists: explore everything; seriously, unless you’re in some kind of hurry, why would you place barriers for yourself? If you’ve got an idea, expand it, give it depth, and explore every door the first idea opens.
Inspiration was needed for the second sketch I tackled; I was browsing through my Magic: The Gathering game cards for general ideas of creatures or characters I hadn’t thought of; their universe is so vast and large, I was pretty sure I could find some stereotypes. I was not disappointed; after looking at a few cards, I stumbled upon a Bog Wraith card and decided to explore what the ghostly figure of a wraith would be in the God Metropolis universe. I went for a common wraith at first, this would be the type you could expect to meet in a haunted graveyard or mansion; the common wraith inspired me a grim reaper-like hooded figure with a large mantle and large skeletal arms with long skeletal fingers; the wraith would hover above the ground and so its garment would be whole and not torn. Then I rolled with the card and designed my very own bog wraith, the kind that would haunt dark swamps and marshlands; I thought its garment could be torn from all the brambles and thorns and low branches you’d expect to find in a bog, the bottom of the draping would be dangling with algae and foul colored water would drip from it, ball and chains would dangle from the figure, because these wraiths would represent haunting ghosts of people having drowned in the swamp, fungus could grow on some parts of the vestment. I started on an ice wraith but it was still too sketchy to be anything tangible.
I would say that concludes today’s blog message. Until next time (hopefully tomorrow, if I stick with the planned schedule), have a glorious night and be creative. Explore everything.
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