BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Dhama Suul Head

by on March 17, 2011 at 12:01 am
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More Suul head sketches, again focusing on the sawtooth look. I liked the hammerhead looks of the top two sketches but figured I’d play around more with an alien take on an actual sawfish snout, since I’ve always found the sawfish to be one very cool looking real-life creature.  None of the sketches turned out very well though as they all looked a bit too “deliberately” designed as opposed to something that truly looks natural.

It’s like when I see a costume design that has a ton of horns and spikes and huge sweeping pieces of oversized armor and flowing capes and sashes and various other embellishments on it. It certainly looks cool, but it always feels like something an artist went to town on and had a lot of fun designing but not something really believable and natural as an actual thing.

And besides, those sawfish-snout Suul sketches ended up looking too much like dragons for me.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Dhama Suul Head

by on March 10, 2011 at 12:01 am
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As I previously mentioned, I didn’t have the design for Dhama Suul done when I did the art for issues #1-4. But I did have a random line in The Big Snow Job #1, Page 20 where Dhama Hes referred to Suul as a “sawtooth.” So that’s what I had to work with. I’m just glad I hadn’t written some other throwaway line that might have been much harder to work with! “Ah, Suul, that visually magnificent alien with partially invisible features and other attributes that are constantly swirling in an indescribable symphony of color and sound!” So yeah, “sawtooth” was okay.

Anyway, sometimes with alien designs, I start with the entire body, since the overall silhouette and body shape is pretty important to me. Other times, I’ll start with the head since that’s really the most important feature, and then work from there. In this case, with the only defining trait being the “sawtooth” line, I figured it’d make most sense to start with the head.

On this page are some of my very early head doodles, for both Suul and possibly some of his henchmen. With the bottom half of the page, I started playing with different heads that might be considered “sawtooth”-y.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Hut Interiors

by on March 3, 2011 at 12:01 am
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With the bulk of the Ulon Dosi village designed, I spent a little time figuring out some of the last remaining bits, like the yak stables and the hut interior where the crew would be held captive. The interior actually came to me pretty quickly as I had it already in my head to have a sunken pit with a central hearth and lofted sleeping areas around the perimeter.

I also settled on Keyla’s lab exterior and interior pretty quickly, in part because I had a pretty clear picture in my head and in part because, to be honest, I didn’t really care all that much about overworking the design since I knew it was only going to be in the story for a few pages and wasn’t a major setting.

Finally, on this page you’ll see a few sketches I did for the bricks of Crush. I kinda like the look of the banded loaf, since it has that little bit of visual flair. But in the end, I just decided that the plainer it looked, the better, so I went back to it being just a regular blocky nondescript brick.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Village Layout

by on February 24, 2011 at 12:01 am
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This was my general list of design aesthetics for the Ulon Dosi village, which I decided to jot down to keep track of things myself. I also did a few more sketches to play around with the terraced look of the village and how the huts would sit at different levels. At this point, I added some cliffside huts, since I thought it would be cool to see a few huts here and there built into the actual surrounding rock walls. I thought rickety wooden slats built into the rock walls to form steps would be pretty cool, especially since I would never EVER have the nerve to walk on anything remotely like that myself.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Hut Details

by on February 17, 2011 at 12:01 am
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Here I finally settled on the Ulon Dosi hut design, as well as some hut details (which I apparently abandoned once I got to the actual drawing of the pages!). For me, the breakthrough was in adding the long curving wood beam “ribs” all around the huts that emerge from the rock base and curve up around the edges of the roof. I think those gave the huts a very distinctive look they’d been missing.

For variety, I came up with several different window frame patterns, so that all the huts didn’t look the same. I also realized that in a snowy environment, you wouldn’t want the windows open to the elements all the time, so I designed different kinds of shutters that could be lowered to close the window openings. In the end, I pretty much just cheesed out and drew the same hut over and over again with the open windows. It was just easier that way, and as background buildings, I figured drawing those kinds of shutter details weren’t really necessary.

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