Character design and concepts (Futuregames)

Concept art from a game project in school. While a lot of it got scrapped I'm still happy with how these four characters turned out. The focus with these characters was to represent a different animal and making each character stand out from one another with different silhouettes and color. To begin the design of each character I looked into a military history book that contained several references for armor, clothing, weapons etc. After that I looked up different types of European animals that would make for interesting references. After selecting 4 different animals I started drawing on paper which is my preferred method of sketching and working. After finding a design I was happy with I scanned in each drawing and imported them into Photoshop for further refinement. After making the line art I added heavy black shadows inspired by comics that would fit with the game's dark tone. After that I filled in the base colors of each character and added a soft gradient for some light variation. Afterwards I added a multiply layer for the shadows and a screen layer for the highlights. 

This was from an assignment we had in school. The assignment was to create a character and give it a level 1 phase and a level 5 phase. Early on I decided to make several different silhouettes and simply play around and see if I could get any interesting shapes. After that I decided on a final character which were a small imp. I made a few sketches of the character on paper, drawing the head and body in different styles and angles before I decided on a final design. Afterwards I looked up photo references on different lighting scenarios and decided to go with a under lit setup. After that I rendered the image in Photoshop by using masks and a lot of the gradient tool and made the two separate versions of the character.  

An illustration I made for some creatures on my free time. The Idea was to have giant snails that would come out during heavy rain and devour several acres of forest. These would then become pests that the general population had to deal with, however due to their immense size and strength of these creatures the humans that hunted them would often find themselves being the pray.