Greetings,
My name is, once again, Suno “Sun” Le, the design and tech lead for the Timberline Paw Print. And I am here to discuss my efforts in creating our terrifying archer, Fa’Mes.
PHASE 01 : Conceptualization
Let us begin with my favourite part of the process, concept creation. Starting September 25th, 2023, I have officially started on my new project. At this stage of the art process, I begin to create extremely random ideas with a central theme. For this project, the theme was “A Monstrous Archer”. From that, I had to tackle one major problem :
“How do you make an archer look terrifying?”
Archers in media typically come in two forms, the dashing blond elf who wields a bow and arrow whilst flaunting their mastery in the art of arrow slinging, or the gruff yet stoic survivalist who hunts to ensure survival. Both of these ideas are extremely cool however it wasn’t the direction I wanted to go for.
PHASE 02 : Illustrating
Let’s start with a very VERY loose sketch. This is the stage where I just lay down some ideas and poses. If I am feeling particularly lazy (like I was when sketching this) I will ignore everything and pretend I’m in preschool with crayons and awful pieces of construction paper. Then afterwards, when I find something that I like, I would clean up the sketch.
Fa’Mes – Progress Shot 1
“Afterwards, I added some values to the sketch.”
Fa’Mes – Progress Shot 2
Now it’s time for the fancy part of my process, the greyscaling and glazing process. This is where I would focus purely on values, making sure that the lighting is close to perfect for this piece. This was actually a lot of fun to do, especially the fur, which was very fun to shade. This was also the part where I polished the drawing and tweaked some anatomy mistakes (you’ll see a lot of those).
“Unfortunately, the light from the moon gets dulled BUT IT GETS BETTER”
Fa’Mes – Progress Shot 3
Welcome to part…something of the process, GLAZING! Now if you have read my previous work “Harvest” you would be somewhat familiar with the process, so to prevent me from reaching my word count you guys should read that. *wink
“WOAH! A HAND!”
Fa’Mes – Progress Shot 5
As you can see, I have added a lot of things to this progress shot: the hair on the VERY alive person, a hand, some polish to Fa’Mes themselves, and more! I also played around with the idea of them having talismans on their rope, but I removed the talismans later because it was, ironically, REALLY hard to draw.
“Finished”
Fa’Mes – Progress Shot Final
