ART WAR | 2D | Snilk, the Mongrelfolk Inventor | vadstart

Name: Vadim
Email: vaderxv@gmail.com
Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artist/vadstart
Tumblr: http://vadstart.tumblr.com/

Hey everyone! My character Snilk (working title, hopefully i can change the topic name later :3) is joining the Art War on the side of Fantasy - he's a mad inventor from a physically weak, but cunning subterranean race of mongrelfolk (another working title) - crafting crazy, but weirdly effective contraptions from improvised ingredients (and smaller creatures ) to strengthen his Fantasy allies and defeat his Sci-fi foes.

My primary goal with him is to show as much personality as possible through the shape language, face expression and gesture/pose. Plus design all of his contraptions to be self-explanatory only through their visual design, not necessary requiring long text descriptions.

Right now i'm working on appealing shapes for his face and figure, without equipment for now (it will come next). Now that i've looked through other great submissions here, i think i'm going to do a couple of silhouettes so i can focus only on the overall shape and ignore small details. General design is based on the Elephant Shrew and other similar small rodents (in the left bottom corner is a Ratogator, his pet).

e11ba56df5.jpg1280x989 187 KB

I finally found the face shape that i like - a right mix of crazy and cutesy!
The body design is also coming along and the ticked version is pretty much what i'll choose eventually - just need to play around with the limbs scale a bit more.
Also starting on the equipment design tomorrow and i want to finish composition thumbs before the end of this weekend.

sketches2.jpg1280x989 172 KB

Fixed proportions to make Snilk look more cunning and the first draft of equipment and how it will look like on him. Tomorrow i'm going to work on making their individual design cooler and more DIY/scrapped looking.
Kinda want to jump to colors and rendering, but i feel that it would be better to finalize the design first. Also, i promise not to be lazy with line weight

sketches3.jpg1280x951 104 KB

@bazuzu лол, точно! Изначально базировал дизайн на землеройке:
lol, true! Here's my main ref for the character, elephant shrew:

Allright, i finished the general design of Snilk's inventions:

sketches15.jpg1024x283 27.7 KB

sketches14.jpg1024x549 50.6 KB

sketches12.jpg1024x983 103 KB

sketches11.jpg1024x796 62 KB

sketches13.jpg1024x1117 84.3 KB

And designed some more clothing variations (i'll probably do 1 more with just a beanie):

sketches16.jpg1280x576 66.7 KB

Can't wait to jump to colors as soon as possible tomorrow!

@bazuzu @katya_cyan Спасибо огромное! :3 Thaaaaaaanks!

A few more options of clothing:

sketches_clothing.jpg1280x1113 142 KB

And color schemes exploration:

sketches_colors.jpg1280x1022 138 KB

Which options do you guys prefer?

In retrospective (and after looking at amazing process of other participants) i feel that the colors are too motley and not very harmonious - that's probably because i started coloring my line sketches without doing b&w designs first and prioritizing different parts (for example, darker bottom, lighter head and very bright equipment like potions and a toad).
Also, design is probably looks to cluttered right now with all the accessories, so i'm going to do a big final character sketch with enough space for everything.
Anyway, i'm off to making thumbnails first.

Some rough thumbnails to explore composition options, i want to showcase both the attack and support abilities of Snilk:

thumbs.jpg1280x702 99 KB