The King (Patreon)

I wanted to talk about His Royal Majesty, the King. You might have wondered what species he might be. Well, King Gellen is a big horn mountain ram. 

But wait, where are his big horns, you might ask. Well, there was an edit to the prologue explaining this. But the prologue was already getting lengthy, and I felt it best to leave this out. 

In the cut prologue scene, Gellen was concerned that his presence might be too intimidating to the people. Not only was he huge in stature, he was also powerful. He asked the prince of the forest to use his magic to hide them. This solved two problems. The second being he could now wear his crown.

The king was the last to be designed. I thought I might show a bit of the process and explain why I took this path.

I start by creating a 3D model in Blender. As an artist, I am comfortable designing in 3D but absolutely horrible at developing skins and textures. Although I've been working in 3D for quite some time, I never really attempted to create textures properly. 

The second issue I've always seemed to face was creating consistency in character likeness. Sure, the front view worked fine, but had such a problem with additional view angles. One day, I thought to myself, why not create a character in 3D! Then I could position the angle and pose and paint over it! This might seem like cheating to some people, and have been called out on it a few times.

My only regret is giving into 3rd party assets. Getting textures, props, clothing, and lighting from sites like RenderHub, PolyHaven, and Daz. It was literally taking years to design these characters completely. My issue is that anyone can use the same assets. I found that it was a bit embarrassing to use them for some reason.

But, I soldered on with my plan. For the most part, overpainting was more fun than I expected. Basically, just tracing over the 3D model and filling in with paint using Photoshop and Procreate. A shit ton of filters and layers later and a single panel is completed. Lazy, I know. 

Personally, I am no fan of 3D comics or graphic novels. Posing in 3D looks odd still. The basic reason is gravity and weight. When you press flesh, it bends and conforms. So, every time two characters interact, I am forced to old-school it and use Photoshop to manipulate and paint collisions of fabric, body parts, and pressure points. I'm sure it's quite doable in Blender, but who has the time for that?

Whoa! I think that should be it for now. If you have any further questions, just ask. I'll be happy to answer.