1916 Easter Rising

I'm a little bit late, but I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter! In Ireland, Easter is significant both religiously and politically. I'm not going to go into detail (knock yourself out on the 1916 Easter Rising page on Wikipedia if you feel that way inclined), but I thought it would be an appropriate time to share this still video project.

You might remember last October I shared the colorization project above. Well, at the beginning of this semester we were asked to add movement to those photographs. So I came back to this one, separated out all the different layers within it, and added a bit of camera movement. I'm pretty happy with the end result!

Don't Starve - Wednesday

Have any of you played the PC game, Don't Starve, by Klei Entertainment? If you haven't, you should! One of my assignments in college this term was to create a new character to be placed within an existing universe, and while some of my friends picked things like Adventure Time and Valiant Hearts, I picked Don't Starve. And I am so glad that I did!

So the first step in the process was research, research, research. I studied the game itself, paying attention to the the line weight, the colours, the shapes, and everything in between. I made some interesting discoveries that I might not otherwise have picked up on; almost every character in the game wears red, for example, and the males only have pupils, while the females only have whites in their eyes. The playable characters, as a set, are incredibly unified, right down to their names: almost all of them start with the letter W.

I also researched different types of characters that I might like to design; and eventually settled on a Horologist, whom I named Wednesday*. Then I was able to sketch out some ideas (throwing away most of them!) and eventually figured out how I wanted my character to look. Below, you can see how I drastically I changed the character from the original sketch into the final lineart.

The next step was colouring, which was a LOT of fun! We were taught a technique of colouring that I had never used before, which allowed for easy changes later on. It worked out quite well, I think! I experimented with different hues and things, but nevertheless I stayed true to the game's styling, and went with a predominantly red colour scheme, with a lot of black scribble detail.

The final part of the assignment was to place the character in different lighting situations, which was my favourite part, by far! We were given five different themes: 01) Mid-day sun 02) Dark rainy day 03) Moonlight 04) Sunrise 05) Haunted House. We weren't asked to design the backgrounds, per se, but I got a little carried away with them... 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the end results. What do you think? Does my character fit in with Don't Starve? Do you have a favourite lighting condition?

*In honour of Wednesday Addams, whom I love, and think would fit in with the game perfectly! I also watched The Addams Family recently and remembered how much I loved it all over again.