Thursday 15 December 2011

Immortal Grapple — VTES Artwork

Here's another take on a popular card — Immortal Grapple




This one was a struggle from the offset, I had a clear image in my head about how I wanted to to portray the shot (a much smaller minion being mangled by a much larger one viewed from the larger minion's perspective) — although this posed problems in terms of scale. The other difficulty was getting the balance right between the image reducing well and looking too cartoony...

I'm fairly happy with the end result (colour wise it's delibrately similar to Clint Langely's version) — but it could've ended up with a completely different vibe. Initially I wanted to include a classic brick wall / alley background (as a homage to older cards) and a striking skinned look to the victim with pearly white eyes. Although in the end this turned out just wrong — a cartoony 1980's comic book vibe which had to go...



What's your thoughts on the two versions? — I think I made a good call killing off the cartoony version and normally something like this wouldn't see the light of day, so any feedback would be appreciate.

Here's a brief overview of the work flow — severely edited down:


And finally the the various versions of the cards:


The previous Immortal Grapple cards have always portrayed equal beings fighting, which in my opinion doesn't represent the current (and past?) meta game. Typically now when an minion plays immortal grapple the other minion is screwed — unless they have damage prevention (like a leather jacket ;)

2 comments:

  1. I liked the brick wall... More brick wall please. Maybe a bit more light around the eyes... Plastic eyeballs = bad, but these seem to have become a bit more "Aliens" or "insert space monster here".

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  2. Yes — a friend of my also commented that the main character needed to be more vampire like. Quite hard to achieve when effectively skinned — but necessary all the same. I think for the time being I'm going to put this one to rest, take the lessons I've learnt and move on.

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