Eyes Of The Forest: Concept art for this Comic Book Part 3

Art by StarTwo

► Eyes of the Forest Indiegogo campaign is ongoing! ◄

This is our final post about Eyes of the Forest by James Streissand, at least for a while.
It’s been thrilling to share with you some of our concept art for this project and we’ve decided it would be grand to show you what we did when drawing a comic page for this particular venture!

When the preliminary layouts are done and approved that is the first step setting the feeling of motion!

“Eyes of the Forest” is a comic adaptation of the book by the same name. James provided us with the script, so before we started to draw we began by reading both the book and the scrip.
This particular page we’ll be showing represents a wondrous moment between characters in uniform that are all from the same division and share the ability to communicate through the use of a mystic ability.

Right away we begin by doing a very rough sketch to capture the descriptions on the script.

After getting the a-ok (lucky that there were no changes requested for this one!) we begin the sketch stage, adding detail.

The next step is getting the inks done,making the the lines as neat as possible.

Now it’s time for the base colours. The scene is placed a bit before the sunset, so the orange helps bring out the blue colour out a lot.

Finally we come in with colour corrections, shadows, highlights and special effects rounded up by some final touches. After getting the thumbs up from James, we consider it done!

All these processes are repeated in the remaining 21 pages of the comic with some pages being simpler, others a lot more complex and tonal work specific for each page, but all of them were a terrific experience for us!

Thank you once again for checking out this third and last part of our posts for EOTF’s concept art and you can check part 1 and part 2 if you still haven’t seen it, without forgetting to read the post about the ongoing Indiegogo campaign.
If you like fantasy, blue giants and huge felines please consider backing this project!

Thank you and as always,
★stay inspired!★

Eyes Of The Forest: Concept art for this Comic Book Part 2

Art by StarTwo

► Eyes of the Forest Indiegogo campaign is ongoing! ◄

This week we would like to introduce you to Alvas, the second main character in EOTF – Eyes of The Forest, a comic book we had the pleasure of developing last year with James Streissand from top to bottom!

Alvas is Runin’s best friend and the brawn in their dynamic duo and from James’ description, we understood he had to be tall and muscular. And also blue!

The first sketch we sent of Alvas

Unlike Runin, who was pretty much set the first time we drew him, Alvas had to be tweaked here and there, because although he is supposed to have a gentle giant look, he’s also a fierce warrior, one you should absolutely not mess with.
And yes, as you might suspect already, we are huge fans of Alvas. We’ll confess, the blue skin is a huge factor.

Less bulk means easier movements

Being a story in a huge wild world, we were also asked to develop a set of fantasy animals to go with it!
Just like the humanoid characters, we followed a description of these creatures and we’ll call it “Unknown Big Cat” for now.

A first approach to the Big Cat, but we wanted to make it look even bigger!

What we had to make absolute, was for this fiend to be a mix of a sabre tooth tiger and a porcupine, ouch! Teeth and needles together? A big warning to run away.

A final, approved concept! We’re glad these don’t exist for real.

When developing a comic or other types of commercial art, artists need to be ready for what the client wants represented and learn how to tackle these with enough ease and especially, readability.

Thank you so much for checking out the second part of our post for EOTF’s concept art and we want to invite you to check part 1 if you still haven’t seen it, without forgetting to read the post about the ongoing Indiegogo campaign.
And if you like fantasy, blue giants and huge felines please consider backing this project!

Thank you once again and as always,

★stay inspired!★

Eyes Of The Forest: Concept art for this Comic Book Part 1

Art by StarTwo

Usually, we are asked to keep quiet about the projects we work on.

It may sound unreasonable, but it is quite common.
Clients may want to protect their intellectual property be it a game design, a storyline, a character’s description, etc and for a determined amount of time, they are entitled to that. It all comes down to what is agreed between us and our clients.

However, James Streissand, the author of our latest project called Eyes of the Forest, was delighted with the idea of sharing a little bit of the production of this comic book and we gladly jumped on the opportunity!
So today we are going to talk a bit about one of the aspects we love the most: working on conceptual art.

After being briefed about the goals of the project and the themes, we began developing the characters.
This process began with James sending us a file with the descriptions and references we needed to get started.

These are usually called Character Profiles and they can consist of a few descriptive words or a complete epic to the most microscopic detail. For us, writing too little about a character will keep us guessing what the author wants portrayed and writing too much will make us lose sight of what is important in the concept.
Fortunately for us, James landed right in the middle and his descriptions were exactly right, especially for the main characters.

Speaking about main characters, meet Runin, the Forest’s protector:

First sketch for Runin

After feedback and corrections, this was the final concept for Runin.

In comic projects is very useful to draw at least two views of the characters, to show how the design works before getting the go ahead for that look.
If necessary, other views can be drawn to show a specific detail. In concept art for videogames we usually need to draw a lot more views!

Stay tuned as we’ll write more about the stages for “Eyes of the Forest”!

★stay inspired!★