Febe de Vos - The Rookies 2022

2021-2022

The following 4 characters are all of the personal projects I have finished in the past year. My goal was to create a set of immersive characters, that don't just feel like a pretty picture to look at. I wanted to challenge myself to make personalities  that feel like they belong somewhere. That they are not just a stand-alone picture but parts of bigger breathing living worlds.

For these projects (with exception of the apprentice) a big challenge of their design process was the character design itself and how to balance the various visual components I wanted them to have.
I also set a series of separate goals for each individual projects. Technical aspects that I wanted to focus and improve upon.

Queen of the Seelie Court

This project was really much of a passion project. All I knew going in is that I wanted to create an ethereal moon queen that was in some way combined with lunar moths. From there on out I started playing around with a base in Zbrush and then overpainting it in Photoshop to get an idea of what I wanted looks wise.

My goal was primarily character design and texturing/ final materials in marmoset. I decided to not really focus on getting it as optimised as I could. This way I could  give all my energy to full fill my set goals.  For the details on her face I used an texturing  XYZ face map that I projected using zwrap.

Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy

At a certain point around the holiday time I really got the itch to make something ballet inspired. I had been watching a lot of dances on youtube and really wanted to incorporate that magical glittery feeling in another fairy. The challenge here was to make a character that aesthetically fitted in with the aesthetic defined by the Seelie queen , whilst keeping it its own unique character.

I really focussed on getting the clothing right for this one, I felt like designing clothing had taken a bit of a backseat on my other projects so I went all out on that.  Texturing and properly retopo-ing her were other technical goals I set for myself here.

W.I.P shots

The Apprentice

Original concept art made by : Marie Magny

I usually prefer doing my own character designs for the freedom it gives me. However "The apprentice" by Marie Magny was a long admired concept in art station 'to do' folder.  I finally felt confident enough in my own abilities to try and tackle it. This project was my first venture into doing hair cards with x-gen. Next to x-gen the focus I had was to really try and get a clean sculpt going and a neat re-topology.

W.I.P shots

Lilith: Mother of Demons

Lilith was the first of my 'real' detailed characters. She started out as a little freehand fun sketch in zbrush and then grew out into a monstrous (haha) project. Because I was used to many small scale projects before her about everything from sculpt-finished presentation was a huge challenge for me.
This was also the first project I've ever used an XYZ face-scan on for the pores in the face.

My Artstation