I have researched 4 artists, these are the ones i knew i was going to research and are in my project plan, they were chosen to help me reinforce certain areas of my project.
The first is Paul Woo Hyun Kwon, one of the concept designers at Riot games.
These are some thumbnail design sketches of a recently released character on League of Legends called Syndra, the theme of this character has already been clearly defined as a gravity mage. These are therefore design sketches rather than purely exploratory thumbnails, these narrow down the design to develop the final character. I will being doing both of these to reach some of my character designs, i have already done some exploratory thumbnails that i posted earlier, i will soon post my selections and development thumbnails.
This is a design sheet of another recent character fro League of Legends, this is the kind of thing i will be producing for my final work, a sheets showing the character, front and back, close ups on details like the head and what ever else may need detailing on the character.
This is a weapon design for a character in league of legends, it is called the mercury hammer and can transform from a hammer to a cannon, if any characters have a weapon i will need to do something like this to show off the weapon in detail, especially if they have functionality like this.
Although this is not artwork done by Paul Kwon he did upload it to his deviant art account, this is a gameplay storyboard that Riot create when they are a releasing a new champion, this allows them to show off some of the characters gameplay through imagery. Something akin to this will be the outcome for my character ability sets though mine will obviously be artwork instead of in game screen shots.
The second artist i looked at was Jason Chan, he is a very talented artist and designer who works at Massive Black the free lance art studio, Jason has done artwork for many games, movies and other media.
This is an image of some of Jason's quick designs, i chose to look at Jason's work because he has great design talent able to infuse characters with the much needed character and story required to make them stand out.
This is a piece of art showing the character Morrigan from the game Dragon Age Origins, i always liked her design but it was unfortunately not translated well into the game.
This is a take on a character called Nova that was designed for an unreleased Starcraft game, it's more his style than anything in this piece that i like, my MOBA game is set in a mixture of themes framed in a sci-fi world so designs like this are intriguing to me.
This is artwork for a Magic the Gathering game, this kind of steam punk fire mage would be at home in any MOBA game, and in fact is, most of the MOBA games i know of have some kind of fire mage, although i like the style design and such i am well aware of steering clear of bastardizing characters i like into my own versions of them.
The last artist i looked at is Dan Luvisi, he created a fantastic graphic novel called Last Man Standing, i bought it myself, if i had access to a larger scanner right now i would have scanned the pages right out of the book to better show why i decided to look at this artist and his graphic novel.
This is the kind of work Dan Luvisi does, high quality rendered illustration and designs, although this particular character does not feature in his book i wanted to show it because i feel that a lot of his designs relate to how my games setting and narrative has formed, this character is like one of the thumbnails i developed
My design is obviously less interesting but it is just a thumbnail.
This is a character from Last Man Standing, Doyle is a rebel assassin, Dan Luvisi has created a futuristic world of of his own design in his book, right down to the rectangular cigarettes. His book exists in a futuristic world filled with robots, gods, tribes family's of assassins and escaped clones. There are even some hybrids and werewolves, this kind of mixed world is the sort of vibe i would like to get across in my MOBA game design through these characters and the worlds in which they come from, the world they now reside in and the arena they are forced to fight in.
This is Hex, the god of sorts in the world of Last Man Standing. The book is told in a unique way, it's called a "killbook of a bounty hunter" meaning the whole thing is like a scrap book or a profile book of all of the protagonists potential allies and enemies. Each character in the book has their own artwork to show what they look like, often done in the style of photographs captured via "intelligence". I really like this method and am considering using a kind of framing device like it as my game is based around character being pulled from their respective homes like picking a roster out of a line up.
This is Noa, an ex-girlfriend of the books protagonist and a New York police officer, although the world is clearly grounded in reality after such craziness that features in it, characters like this help show that the world is still a world and has a functioning society and not just bounty hunters running around everywhere. I would like to try and have this kind of effect in my game, all the characters cohabitate on this new world so i would like to show of this depth in character both through the lore pages and in the character designs, to show that they are people living in a functional world regardless of how alien it may be.
