Doctor Druid

Doctor Druid is a current commission that I am working on for a mobile based strategy game. This project was as confusing as it was fun to work on, The client started out providing me with little to no information about the project and left it up to me to find what they wanted. Not exactly a professional mentality for a company, but I had a lot of fun wandering around in the dark figuring out what they wanted and exploring my own artistic tastes. The commision was for character and game assets design of a druid that would live in a certain environment, I was working on the forest themed environment. I started my exploration with the three sketches to the left, finding cool elements of nature that I could strap onto my model that would make them feel foresty. I eventually picked my favorite elements from each of these and combined them into my druid sketch (pictured below).

The design was cool, but overall kind of bland. I liked the forest elf look, but I felt that it wasn't really anything groundbreaking. everyone had seen elves before. It occurred to me that although this character looked like someone who lived in a forest, he didn't really look like the forest himself, he had to much of the human world and existing mythology in him. I sketched a lot of different things after this, I moved away from designing the actual character and started to sketch elements of nature, looking for naturally occurring features that I thought could be incorporated into some kind of character.

About five minutes before i was due to present my current material to the client, I quickly sketched out a little sprite looking character. i wanted to give the client multiple options that were completely different but in the same style. I use a vastly different body proportion and adapted some of the materials from my previous design onto it. My client ended up being not at all interested in the first design that i had spent hours on, and loved the one i had done in ten minutes, five minutes before the presentation.

At this point i started to get a bit of an idea for what the client wanted. They were looking for the more exaggerated and flamboyant style, they wanted something new. I took this idea and started to exaggerate even further on the concept. I came up with an idea that this character was not just someone who lived in the woods, he was part of it. This character was himself a tree, but just a very different kind of tree. He form bonds with the trees of the woods, and they are family to him, he even carries his favorite of the trees with him everywhere he goes. My client loved this idea and even incorporated it into the lore of the game. Not only did it give visual and conceptual interest to the character but it also gave him a motivation for his actions in the game itself.