Final Concept designs & thoughts
For my final blog post for the concept art class I have 3 character design concepts, 1 research page, and 2 informal sketches ( one is of weapon concepts and the other is a comic page concept) for my future graphic novel/film adaptation titled “Initium”.
For the first character concept design page I have some armor and weapon designs. This is for the character called Kenji, which in Japanese means second son, strong and vigorous. I chose this name because I actually thought it meant “precious sword” and I was close because “ken” means sword and “ji” means time. However, I still like the name because the character is a Japanese man and I have always liked that name. Moving forward, I have a concept for Kenji’s armor which has a few notable details, like a laser-guided grappling hook at the back of the hand. My favorite design on the page is the under armor which I drew as an arm at the bottom of the page. I drew inspiration from the metal gear solid video games, but added my own aesthetic. I also have Kenji’s boot, which has a removable knife and movable rockets at the back of the heel. The last design on there is a plasma katana, which I named the “Gladium Katana”.
The second character design is for one of the protagonists in my story. For now I am calling him Frank, but I don’t know if I will go with that name because there is no reference for it like I have for most of my other characters. Frank is an older (around 56) American militarized man. He is wise yet very physically powerful with massive arms. He totes a bulletproof carbon-fiber vest, equipped with multiple tactical items and pockets. He also has his trusty 357. Magnum which is always hanging from his hip. I will be refining this character more in the future, because he is a main character and I want him to be just right. However, I do think I am fairly close to that goal.
The third character design page is of a character I recently dubbed “The Iron King”. Unlike the previous characters, this one is a bad guy. He is from the medieval era and eventually gets reanimated in spirit for the modern times, but his unidentified metal armor remained intact while his body had degraded. I drew inspiration from Darth Vader (Star Wars) and Sauron (LOTR) for this character. I took the concept of a suit with many pieces put together from Vader and the metallic, pointed look from Sauron. However, this character is definately separate from those ones in terms of narrative. On the page is the king’s helmet, which connects to the shoulder part of the armor. There is also concepts for his weapon(s) which is a large sword, mace, broad sword, and a crystal sword. This character has a bit more work to do, but I have started to narrow down my idea for what I want him to look like.
This page is my one research page with a few concept sketches sprinkled in. I had originally came up with my working title, “Initium” through researching latin definitions. I wanted to take that further and look up all possible words I think would benefit from using a latin phrasing. I found some very interesting translations in my research, most notable to me was the definition for sword in latin, which is “Gladium”. I already decided to use that in my narrative. Another cool definition I found was for time, which in latin is called tempus. I also want to go further with this research and look up other translations separate from latin, like ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian, Celtic, Japanese, and Southern American. I really want people to recognize the effort I put in to each character and detail in my story, akin to how people recognized JRR Tolkien’s research with LOTR. I also have a few sketches that I touched up digitally on there. One is of a blind soothsayer (possibly native African) that I have been thinking about as a new character. the other two are environments I have been contemplating. The top one I have already done in my previous post, but the other environment concept is new. It is of a large hole in the jungle with it’s own flora/fauna that is hidden from the outer world. I actually enjoyed the research here, because I learned a lot of valuable information from it and I definitely know that it helped my preproduction process.
These last two pages are of sketches that I have been working on most recently. The top one is some weapon concepts for another character in “Initium”. The (untitled) character can be described as a soldier monk for God, because he has a revelation from God and gets his hands back which were previously destroyed in a blender. He then becomes a soldier with “God’s hands”. Anyways, he has a bow which he uses and he is also equipped with throwing knives and ninja stars that are all in the shape of crosses. Along with those I’m thinking of adding a small crossbow that is fitted to his wrist, also in the shape of a biblical cross.
The second page is a concept sketch of a comic page involving the character from the previous page. This page reveals what happened to the character’s hands, which were both put into a blender, completely tearing them off. I want to refine this page when I get the time and work on expanding this character’s backstory because he becomes one of the major protagonists in “Initium”.
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