BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Keyla

by on January 27, 2011 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog Entries

I talked a little bit about designing the Ulon Dosi females in the Commentary for The Big Snow Job #4, Page 6. Here we have the sketches I did to flesh out Keyla, especially her outfit. Obviously I wanted to make her clothing similar in “language” to the other Ulon Dosi, but it needed to be a slightly more feminine version of the standard hide tunics. And as I mentioned in the other Commentary, the yellow color of her outfit was to make it a bit “softer” visually than the tan and natural tones of the other Ulon Dosi.

Keyla’s cloak also needed to stand out, since in many of her earlier panels, only a small portion of her would be showing and I needed the look to be, more or less, instantly and easily recognizable. I liked the patchwork enough that it eventually made it into Clem’s outfit as well. As for the white fuzzy fur, I also incorporated that into Goshen’s look to visually connect them since they’re related as father and daughter.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Clothes

by on January 20, 2011 at 12:01 am
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A few more Ulon Dosi clothing concepts, including the rifle bandoliers that the village warriors would wear. With this, I had enough samples done that I could just mix and match different elements once I got to the actual drawing stage. The only Ulon Dosi characters that got specific outfit designs were Keyla, Clem, and Goshen. I’ll go into Keyla’s design in the next post, and the Goshen and Clem sketches will be popping up in the Bonus Features for The Big Snow Job #5.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Clothes

by on January 13, 2011 at 12:01 am
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The Ulon Dosi clothes were a fun design challenge since I had to work with the constraints of the fur capes and try to make clothing that would believably work with those bodies. I always planned for the race to be fairly low tech, so early on I settled on pretty basic leather hide tunics and wraps. I did try a couple other looks in the first few sketches but they definitely looked a bit too fancy for me, so they were quickly abandoned. I think the rough edges and visible stitching really pulled together the hand-made, frontier look I was going for.

In the cases of the body-crossing wraps, the idea is that the clothing wraps around the neck and down the chest, continues around the back of the waist (underneath the fur cape), and then ties in the front. Basically, I wanted the clothing to fit the body while still leaving the fur cape clear to hang in the back.

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Body

by on January 6, 2011 at 12:01 am
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With the Ulon Dosi head settled, I then tackled the body. As a side note, sometimes I sketch the entire body and head at the same time if I’m going for an interesting overall silhouette. In this case, I wanted to establish the personality of the race with the head first, and then use that to derive the body.

I wanted the Ulon Dosi to be beefy and intimidating, so the broad shoulders and slightly hunched bodies were there from the get-go. I also thought about having different striped patterns in the fur, a concept that I either abandoned or forgot about once I got to the coloring stage (oops).

Early on, I stumbled upon the idea of the fur capes, which was something I really liked since I personally had never seen that kind of concept before. You can read some of my comments about the fur capes back on The Big Snow Job #3, Pages 14-15. Of course those fur capes made the clothing much more awkward to design since the clothes now couldn’t wrap around or under the arms the way normal shirts can. More on the clothing in the next post…

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BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Ulon Dosi Head

by on December 30, 2010 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Blog Entries

I knew I wanted the Ulon Dosi to have a goat-like appearance, so that made for an easy starting point. In general, with aliens, I don’t mind drawing inspiration from actual animals, but I’m not a big fan of just putting straight-up animal heads on human bodies. I prefer to play around with features, mixing and matching them between different animals (or making them up), and I always try to play around with different proportions.

The Ulon Dosi had the extra challenge in that I knew they were going to be major characters in the story arc and needed to be sympathetic and look like intelligent beings, so I didn’t want them to look TOO animalistic. So I deliberately kept the snouts from being too long and tried to straddle that line between animal and human proportions in the face.

As a random note, back in 2007, I did a freelance comic project called The House of IL for a corporate anniversary event. The 3-issue comic was distributed among the company employees but was not made available to the masses. It was a fun D&D-type story about a band of adventurers and I really liked the different character designs I did for that series since the characters all had armor based on different historical styles, and each set of armor was distinctive and had its own telltale, instantly recognizable features. Anyway, one of the characters had tiny beads in his hair, and I always liked that look, so those beads made it into the Ulon Dosi as war beads that the fighting males of the village wear.

You can check out some pages from The House of IL, as well as the character sheets here. If, for some reason, you’d like to buy a set of the comics, just shoot me an email through my Contact page.

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