Week 1 - The Team

 Here's my character design from the first Toolkit 2 session - we were tasked in groups with coming up with a team of characters that looked like they belong together. The group I was in decided to go with a D&D theme, and I was tasked with designing the leader of the team. This guy isn't the smartest or the strongest, but he is very charismatic, the glue that holds the team together. He's also a bard, fitting the D&D theme.

I decided to finish this one digitally so that I could quickly scribble/ paint the bust shot on the left to figure out the colours, as well as to achieve some really clean cell shading to which I added a purple overlay and airbrushed over on some add/multiply layers to make the colours and shading really pop. The gold metallic effect was way easier on the watercolour style sketch on the left, but I managed to achieve a similar effect on the main piece of artwork as well.

 

 

The rest of our group/team seemed to be making monkey guys (based on Sun Wukong as that game came out recently) so I've done that here as well,

 

 

 as you can see in the sketch on the right, I initially was gonna go in a very different direction and make him a dragonborn, but because of the previously mentioned monkey theming and the fact that a more human face would look more approachable I ended up making him more of a half-elf, and later added the monkey tail.

This one is just a random sketch/ pose

These last two sketches are experimenting with those silly puffy shorts (seemed more bard-like) and a different instrument - the sketch on the right was actually the first one I did, and the one on the left was the last. The proportions of all of these may be slightly warped as I wasn't using a reference for any of these.