Peter Mohrbacher
patreon
Concept Art - Characters and reliquary pins
🕑 Added 2024-07-27 14:04:10 +0000 UTCI ended up with a smaller than normal batch of concept art this week in large part due to splitting my time with work on a new line of enamel pins. Even though the pins are simpler and smaller than these character concepts, they take quite a bit longer to get right. Maybe I'm just bad at graphic design or linework, but I also believe making something clean and simple is really hard.
The theme for the pins is reliquaries. These are real world objects where bits of preserved human body parts are presented in elaborate containers. The ones I'm referencing are all from a Catholic tradition.
My idea for the pins is to create a series of preserved pieces of Watchers, trapped inside decorative vessels that double as miniature prisons. I want these to represent a weird mix of veneration and captivity.
All of them are works in progress for the time being. Keep an eye out for future updates.
Worldbuilding Updates
I made a list of all the locations I've been creating characters for and I'm up to 13 major cities in this world so far. It's more than I was imagining, so I might end up pruning some of the less interesting ones and downgrading them to cults existing inside one of the other locations.
Even though I've already made over 50 paintings for this project, you can see from this sheet how many of these pieces represent first drafts and how many gaps there are in the overall project. If I were to making one priest, one knight, one monster, one virtue, and one other design for each major city, I would need to make 65 total pieces in order to just get a single draft of the world guide. Drilling down and building up any one of these locations could involve quite a bit more art than this, so I would estimate I'm only about 25% or less through this phase of the project.
I probably don't need to have equal coverage for every corner of the world in order to move forward with the next steps in the project, so I probably don't need hundreds more pieces in order to begin pushing forward, but we'll see. There is not a set process for how this is supposed to go, so I am keeping an open mind about what comes next.
Concept Art
Shade of Hasmed - My first pass at a lower-order Angel occupying Hasmedon. Overall, this guy looks how I expected. My desire to draw more weird monster guys is rising.
Priest of Israfel - This felt a bit uninspired to me. A big turning point in the worldbuilding project so far was my weirder take on the Knight of Gabriel. Compared to that piece, this one is starting to look bland. I feel like if I don't come up with an interesting idea for how to go beyond just costuming these guys, I'm not living up to the potential for the project.
Knight of Matariel - It dawned on me that I haven't created any concepts for one of my favorite cities/angels. Like the priest of Israfel, this design feels a bit too much like a costume and not conceptual enough. While this first draft isn't what I'm looking for, there are little wins I plan to take forward as I explore more of Matarialis.
Priest of Suchlaph - There are moments about this design I like. It's coming close to what I had in my head, but I feel like there is a way of pushing some of these ideas further. My gears were really grinding this week.
Comments
Mike Gorlewski
I think I speak for all of us when I say you can take your time. Rome wasn’t built in a day😉.
Brian Hudson
Ooh, more pins! You're right though, clean and finalized designs definitely take more work than concept art (arguably). I like each city having two major themes, that'll allow for more complexity and depth to them. If you're worried about giving sufficient detail to all of them, or how much work might be involved, maybe pick some to focus on for a "core" book, with smaller sections on the rest, and then expand those others in a supplement? I dunno how extensive of a product line you wanted to do with this. Either way, I'm excited to see the final product!
