Rene Kovac Concept Art & Illustrations

The main focus of this project was creating character turnaround sheets/ character break downs with the theme being Slavic Mythology. Each character concept represents a Slavic god or Deity. The game genre I wanted to target with these character concepts was 3rd person MOBA games or 3rd person fantasy RPG games. 

I have researched many concept art pipelines e.g. Titan Forge Games, Riot Games and tried applying their methods to my own work to bring my characters to life in a practical way. 

Character line up illustration.

Development Process

The process I took to making each character took some time to get to where it is now. I had to over come some hurdles like trying to be more loose with my sketches etc. and reflect a bunch. But eventually I solidified a good consistent and efficient method. 

The method:

I first start with the initial sketches. Keeping everything very loose and just trying to get on paper anything that comes to mind and that could work. Not being afraid to really exaggerate and go off the rails a little. 

In the second stage I further develop the sketches. I take parts from the first stage I think worked well and mix and match parts to create new versions of the character and see what works there and what doesn't.  

After that I move onto the refined sketches stage. In this stage I try to focusing more on the finer details like armour details, shapes, clothing structure and trying to make more sense of the overall design. I also try experimenting with a few poses during this stage. I found that posing the characters in more dynamic and dramatic poses made them look more godly and emphasised their personality but I was also trying to present the character in a clear easy to see way.

Lastly I take the character into the colour variations stage. Here is explore various colour combinations. After that I move onto the character turnaround sheet where the character is presented in its final form with various angles and orthographic views. 

During this project I tried to make every character turnaround sheet as clear and as easy to  understand for the 3D artist as possible.

In the process video I begin with the finalised sketch work of the character. I then block in the base colours but keeping everything organised and separated on layers as I use clipping masks to do the shading and values, so for example I will block in the waist cloth but do it on a separate layer from the skin. This just makes the process of adding shading much easier and faster for me later on.

Then I usually do 2 dark passes and then 2 light passes on everything but it varies depending on how much depth I want to give to each item or section of the character.

After the passes, I start working on highlights, ambient occlusion and little particles etc. 

Environment

Peaceful Isolation. The wooden building was inspired by a traditional Slovakian building from the 17th century. 

Fan Art & Illustration

This was a really fun fan-art project of Smite, Battle Ground of the Gods. Smite is one of my top favourite MOBA games.

This skin concept is for the character Heimdallr who is a Norse god and is known as the watcher, the one that sounds the horn of Ragnarok. 

The skin idea turns Heimdallr into an 80s geeky and goofy UFO hunter, a conspiracy theory lunatic. He always has his eyes in the skies, searching for UFO's and throwing Area 51 signs at his enemies. He will sound the megaphone when doomsday is upon us and Aliens have come to conquer earth. 

I am very passionate about my music which also deeply inspires me in numerous ways. I adore the aesthetics and creativity.

 I have painted a few portraits of some band members from several bands that I love by using a very painterly style which en-tales using just one layer and a very textured brush. A messy style I like experimenting with and it also serves as a little challenge to just paint on one layer every time. A very traditional approach except through digital medium. 

With some other illustrations I used different techniques and brushes to achieve more polished rendering. 

Maria Franz, singer of Heilung.

Falk Shlegel, organ player of Powerwolf.

Tomasz Wróblewski, bassist of Behemoth.

This painting was inspired by a Queen album. 

Apple Brain.

See the youtube link below if you wish to see the time lapse of me making this illustration.

Thank you for stopping by!