ART WAR 5 | 2D Submissions | Art World War | Indonesia | rakagami

rakagami 2020-12-29 13:36:04 UTC #1

I'd like to make something related to my home country Indonesia. Since I grew up in another country I'll have a lot of research to do

rakagami 2020-12-29 18:17:17 UTC #2

My brainstorming sessions has rougly come to this

Things that I know that I want:
- The character has to defend (A guardian of some sort)
- The character is some form of giant or bigger than human beast/warrior

It is very typical of Indonesian lore (at least how I understand it) to be presented in these Shadow puppets (Wayang) so I want to try to focus on designs based on Wayang/Gatot Kaca

rakagami 2020-12-29 18:37:06 UTC #3

I think focusing on Gatotkaca is nice because it is one of the more prominent indonesian mythology figure and my mom is quite a fan of him. Its mythology has some overlaps with Indian mythology but the design is heavily based on outfits from Javanese tribes.

Of course my design won't be a carbon copy of an existing Gatotkaca design but having some inspirations from him might be nice. Since there already is a "mainstream"-ish design made for gatotkaca in the game mobile legends, I tried making my references only contain the puppet version of the character

I started by making grounded designs of gatotkaca to determine which body-type I like

For some reason I like the thin body-type (3) so I will be focusing on this body-type. The sillhouette is still a bit boring so now might be the time to incorporate more elements

rakagami 2020-12-29 19:49:27 UTC #4

Some more explorations on the previous number 3

SergejFel 2020-12-29 19:58:40 UTC #5

Looks awesome so far! Have fun with your entry

rakagami 2021-01-01 00:56:39 UTC #6

@SergejFel thanks

rakagami 2021-01-01 01:01:51 UTC #7

I feel quite limited sticking with Gatotkacha so I started trying out an Orang Utan themed character. Since I already know I want to make a defending character it fits quite nice with somehing like "Guardian of the Rain forest" or "Protector of the indiginous people" or something like that. For now I just doodled around generic monkey shapes

I kinda liked the idea of the character being a kinda "God" figure to the people. I'll post the rest of my sketches soon

rakagami 2021-01-01 23:27:31 UTC #8

I really like going forward with the Orang-Utan Idea. This gives a lot more options for interesting sillhouettes but makes it a bit more complicated to make the "defending" interesting. I really like the "Baluse" shield which is from the Nias tribe and you'll see it incorporated often in the following explorations. I also tried to incorporate some of the Gatotkaca elements.

I started off with male Orangutans:

rakagami 2021-01-01 23:30:33 UTC #9

I get that the male Orang-Utans are the most recognizable ones and probably the better choice for a design representing an "Orang-Utan Guardian" but I just found this picture of a female Orang-Utan and it looked so awesome and majestic OMG. At this point I wanted to focus on female Orang-Utans

rakagami 2021-01-01 23:31:38 UTC #10

My female exploration sketches are as follows:

Any kind of feedback is welcome

rakagami 2021-01-01 23:34:46 UTC #11

I actually was suprised that the spiky stuff on M1 doesn't look too bad I still think it's a bit too spiky. Of the male designs I like the face of M2 the most and the sillhouette of M3. Comparing M3 and F4 (since both are designs with lots of little orang utans on their back) I prefer F4 since it's more fitting for a female orang-utan to take care of kids

rakagami 2021-01-01 23:48:44 UTC #12

F2 and F6 aren't really too inspired (F2 looks more like an egyptian Bigfoot than an orang-utan and F6 looks weird)

F5 looks quite weird like a priest, a bit too western imo.

F1 is basically just the reference dressed up with some clothes and a shield.

My favorite designs up to now are F3 and F4. I actually don't know whether it's okay to show the nipple like this but the rules implied if someone looked over my shoulder and I'm not ashamed it's fine, so I think this level of nipple is fine. The way F4 holds her shield kinda doesn't make sense (since for the Baluse your hand has to fit in that round little thing) but those can be redesigned to a wrist-guard or something with similar sillhouette. I like the shape of F3 but I also really like the concept of F4, since my endgame is making a "Defending Guardian", making an "Ancient Orang-Utan Grandma which protects the young apes" really works well with the theme.

Going forward I will focus on the F4 design but I will have to figure out what to do with her hands.

Tesat 2021-01-02 00:05:50 UTC #13

f4 is really cool but I like f3's pose a lot also the silhouette is more interesting. I like how the baby orangutans on her a part of the design on f4

rakagami 2021-01-02 00:07:19 UTC #14

Indonesia is a country of many islands. Since it's so diverse I think it would be interesting to incorporate one design from every of the 5 major Islands (or the indonesian part of the island) into the design ( Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Papua )

I am a fan of the Baluse shield which is around Sumatra. Incorporating designs from Gatot Kaca means incorporating designs from Java which is then a given. I'll have to research what to incorporate from the other islands.

rakagami 2021-01-02 00:08:57 UTC #15

Thank you for the feedback!! I agree, F3 has a very strong sillhouette maybe I can use the baby orangutan concept while using a sillhouette similar to F3

rakskuder 2021-01-02 02:28:30 UTC #16

I love these thumbnails! And I can tell the decision you made designing an Orangutan was for the best. My fav characters to be created will be always hybrids between animals and humans, such a good times mixing the concepts! Keep up the good work I'll be checking out!

Gil_Ascher 2021-01-02 16:26:24 UTC #17

wow you've come so far in such a short amount of time! so I love m1 a lot and and f5 and f3 are super awesome, as @tesat said i like the design of the little orangutans on her back! im excited to see how this comes along!

rakagami 2021-01-02 16:43:35 UTC #18

Thank you for the kind words
I also really love animal human hybrids (which is why I jumped from the human-only bandwagon so quickly, haha)

rakagami 2021-01-02 16:44:29 UTC #19

Thanks very much
The design with little orangutans looks promising, I'll be focusing on refining that

rakagami 2021-01-02 16:57:31 UTC #20

The indonesian flag is a very basic Red and White

In grade school they taught me that those colors mean Courage for the color red, Divinity or Saintliness for the color white (at least that's how I remember it)
I couldn't come up with any interesting acessory to give my champion which can contain the indonesian flag. A headband would be too cheesy and just pasting the colors on top of the shield seems a bit lazy for me. Since white in this context is a "divine color" it would be cool to use an albino variant of an orangutan

The concept in my head will be that everytime the champion has to fight, as in exercising Courage, the champion will draw red war paint on its head or so thus creating the colors of the Indonesian Flag in a very diagetic way. By making the orangutan itself white it is implied by the meaning of the Indonesian Flag that the orangutan is a holy/divine being.