The third Archmage: the Necromancer

How we expect to make a game like this without a powerful Archmage capable of rising creatures from dead? In this post, we are going to cover the creation process of the concept art for one of our most beloved Archmages: the Necromancer.

Adrián Fernández Delgado has joined us as a new collaborator in our team for helping us with concept art. (http://tortugamarina.wordpress.com), an illustrator specialized in comics and character design. Here we will show you part of his workflow giving birth to our new Archmage.

Brainstorming!

For those of us working in arts, it is well-known that a good concept requires a lot of effort and many attempts: the artist needs to learn to say good bye to a lot of ideas that doesn't fit properly in the project's needs. For they not dying away into silence, we've decided to show you some concept art that was discarded during the brainstorming stage.

The definitive Necromancer

After a bunch of ideas, finally we found the new Archmage. What blew our minds the most was the face design (take a look in the previous gallery, fourth picture, third character). It had something original and catchy, so the first step was to ask Adrián to detail the face features so we could properly see what he had imagined. This was the result:

Face detail

Developing the Archmage

Now that we have a definitive character, the next step was to do some clothing test to find out the style for our new Archmage. Here you can see Adrían's work. As you will appreciate, the customizable "soul lamps" and shoulders are also approached. They are the two interchangeable items that our Archmage will use.

And finally, these are the clothes we've decided to go with. Here you can see them, together with some details of hands and feet:

Color and material tests

Now that we finally have our Necromancer ready, everything starts moving faster. Adrián is working in an action pose while Elias is studying colors and materials. These were some of our tests:

Cutomizable items

As we already told you, our new Archmage has two customizable items: the "soul lamp" and his shoulders. Both objects will provide different abilities, power ups or new spells, so it is essential to choose them wisely prior any combat. Take a look at some of the "soul lamps" drawings that Adrián made.

Final concept ready for 3D art stage

This is the action pose Adrían was working on. A much more elaborated pose, with our Necromancer in the middle of a summon.

Finally we joined our final character with the chosen color set and this is the result. With it, we immediately put our hands on 3d modeling. But it will be shown in the next post. We don't want to unveil everything at once! What I guarantee you is that the wait will worth it and that the result (in our humble point of view) is incredible!

Once more, we really hope you have enjoyed our post. It has been a pleasure to write it. In a very few days, we will post every detail in the Necromancer modeling process, so if you don't want to miss it, suscribe to our blog! You can use the form in the top right margin of the page.

Don't forget that you can also follow us on Facebook and Google+ and we also have a Steam Concepts project that we would love you to follow.

The Archmagia team.