Aight, so let’s ignore the 3 months without a post and the pokémon projekt that fell apart. So the last couple of months I’ve been doodling with this Dragon Quest inspired projeckt, that I know hastily name “Questing Dragon”.
The vague idea behind the game was some warfare game mixed with some plotline/quest mechanics from Arkham Horror. So I imagine you are fighting a war with regular army pieces while at the same time you have a few hero characters moving around the map, solving quests and supporting the war.
I began this project like many others with collecting references and map out what inspiration will go into the projekt, primarily to make the design feel focused. I fell in love all over again with Akira Toriyama's work when I noticed all the similarities to Ken Sugimori’s work when I was trying to mimic that style for the pokemon projekt.
This is actually not my first stint with Akira Toriyama's style, I made a few comics in that style for an art school assignment some year ago, and it is really encouraging to see that I’ve improved a lot. My overall shape construction is much more on point, but the inking is what I’ve improved the most
For the actual design of the characters I had long wanted to merge Jack Kirby's character design into a different style, and this seemed like the perfect projekt. Looking through just a slice of all the stuff he’s done it becomes so overwhelmingly obvious how creative this man was, so many great designs for just throw-away characters. The graphic design of the components themselves was heavily inspired by any and all covers designs associated with Dragon Ball or Dragon Quest.
Basically I dove straight into this projekt without having much of a macro idea how I wanted it all to fit together, but I did to this preliminary sketch just as a checklist what I wanted in the game and how stuff interacted. And when you look at the finish components you can see that there weren’t any radical changes to the overall layout of the cards.
I just semi-traced a Toriyama character to have something to work off of before I dove in and explored the style myself, just added the swedish liberal party's logo (cause it looks like a dong). As you can see the design of the card did not evolve that much, just got more and more refined, although the finished design, which you’ll see later have another color scheme and some extra details.
Initially I wanted to have the “graphics” (the non character illustration part) done in photoshop so that I easier could get a rough texture to match the illustration. But after testing it out in Illustrator I felt like it matched the illustration pretty well, even though the graphics are sharp vectors and the illustration have the fuzzier brush lines of photoshop.
Don’t know if this is to any help to anyone, but I’ll just write down some notes about each step that went into each illustration (same process for the items).
1. first up the pencil sketch (not actual pencil but you know). Obviously this comes in several steps with a tighter and tighter sketch, although I tend to not go too finished with the pencils as I want some leeway when I ink the picture
2. This was a step that I added pretty late in the process. Realised I had to plan out where I wanted to have my light source and where I wanted to have my solid blacks. Also just a quick and dirty way to figure out the color scheme, especially important when you are working with so few colors.
3. Inking step. Toriyama did not have a dramatic amount of line weight variation, so the inking is mostly the same weight all over, with some slight variation. Also noteworthy if we compare to Ken Sugimori; there are very few really sharp edges on the inks, all volumes are very fluid and fluffy and has some thickness to them so there are seldom any sharp edges. This stand in sharp contrast to Sugimori which is almost entirely sharp edges.
4. Final step the digital watercolor. As I presented in the reference pictures in the beginning I was taking the colorscheme straight from the Dragon Quest manuals, really fell in love with the two-tone printing style. At first I was really confused how I were going to achieve that effect and tried several different methods; I tried painting the whole thing first in grayscale and then via clipping masks and layer effects apply the colors, and I tried to switch the image to CMYK mode and play with those channels. In the end I found the most straightforward way was to just pick the colors and make a color pallet that I limited myself to when coloring the artwork.
Still have a really hard time getting the water colors not to look over-rendered, certainly something I will have to practice more with. In the case with Toriyama, aswell sa Sugimori, the use of the white of the paper is super important. If you color everything it will not look like something out of the Dragon Quest manuals. I do think I found a good way to bring in a lot of white in my illustrations.
I’ve long have issues as to how present the cards in the best manner, I feel like just posting the raw image file does not do the projekt justice. As I don’t have an access to a color printer I instead cut and glued together some mock-up cards that I then could photoshop the cards onto, to get something more presentable. And I think the turned out allright, get a better feel what they would look like printed. The cards are all ridden with spelling mistakes, ignore those.
I basically came up with the factions as I went, which in hindsight was not the optimal way, spending a few hours doing some simple concept art and making a distinct design language to each could have saved some time later. I knew I wanted to have some overtly one-dimensional bad guy faction that harkened back to the Dragonlord, but also mix in some elven wilderness vs civilization sort of stuff, that became the Antler. For the Caprinae I wanted to reuse the sheep design from the manga comic I had made, and explore that notion further of sheep warriors. Unfortunately I never fully developed what their culture or civilization would be like, which left them feeling a bit bland. The Heir of Frei are just red headed viking people, with perhaps some Kirby New Gods stuff thrown in.
So the first card Cloud is basically just Nightcrawler but like not blue and with white smoke instead.
Princess Annika’s design was actually inspired by some of those pop-up ads for horrible browser games that came up while I was looking for references. I liked the hairstyle and how it sort of felt like some “Leia on steroids” kind of thing, which I sort of the idea I had for this character, very much Leia.
The last card “Son of Hemsdal” was the first character illustration I made and I should probably remake it with all the new coloring techniques I have. Though it is a struggle trying to have the character dark and stereotypical evil looking while also bring in all the white spaces that are needed to emulate the Dragon Quest manual style.
Here are the item cards which you can equip you champions with as the go around questing. There’s no frame of reference but these are like mini card size like 7x4.5mm (?), while the character cards were regular poker sized cards.
Funny thing with these illustrations were that the axe to quite some time to make, I went through several iterations and played around with perspective and all kinds of things. A few days later I sat down and basically drew and colored the rest of the items in the same time it took to make that one Axe. And I feel like they turned out much closer to the DQ manual feel, the Axe became a bit to over-rendered.
Ignore the card names and abilities, they were just spur of the moment so that all cards wouldn’t have placeholder text. They are also ridden with spelling mistakes
not much to say, though I really like the mace. It was really hard to make a maul that does not feel or like Mjolnir from the Thor comics, especially hard when your main design inspiration is Jack Kirby.
A few different card types, the two different spell cards, black borders are the “chaos” spells which are more powerful spells that must be discarded after use, and the white borders are “order” spells which can be used multiple times. I was looking for some suitable symbols to further indicate the different spell types, but I didn’t want to go with the classic chaos cross so I searched the internet after some cool looking actual historical chaos symbols. In the end I just went with a triangle, sharp and radical, for chaos, and a square, stable but boring, for order. Side note I was surprised to find out that the chaos symbol (chaos cross) was invented by Michael Moorcock in his Eternal Champions books, always assumed that symbol had some historical background.
The two cards to the right are the quest cards, I made them in this case the same size as the item cards, but if made properly the would regular sized poker cards. Although this is the only card back I’ve show all of the card backs have a similar design with some illustration and some fluff text. I actually really liked the idea of having some fluff text on the back side of the card, like it further establishes the context of what you are doing in universe.
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