What I Plan to do to Fulfill the Brief

For this project I intend to produce 3 digital paintings portraying 3 of the key scenes from the series of Death Dealer book Prisoner of the Horned Helmet.

Scene 1: Depicting the event in the book when Cobra takes Gath to the Temple of the Master of Darkness to give hem the horned helmet and arm him with the weapons to destroy the Kitzzak army. 

The scene will be either an external shot of the temple in the Smoking Lands, a volcanic region in the world of Death Dealer. Or a shot of the interior showing the shrine to the Master of Darkness with the giant Saurian  (reptilian) skull in which the helmet resides.

Scene 2: An action shot of Death Dealer on horseback fighting the Kitzaak Army.

Scene 3: An action shot of Death Dealer facing off against the Warlord Klang after Cobra has given him the potion giving Klang the power of the Master of Darkness, turning him into a huge lizard man.

Visual research and Development work to follow.

Death Dealers - Character Origins

Before becoming the Death Dealer, Gath was once a man, a tribeless barbarian who was raised in an uninhabited forest. His parents were murdered before his eyes as a child, and he managed to escape to the woods. He Became an experienced hunter and survivor by adolescence, by his adulthood stories had spread to the surrounding tribes.

Sometime later the forest and surrounding lands are invaded by a group of foreigners named the Kizzaks. Cobra a young girl who has heard stories of Gath and his savagery, tries to seek his help. While trying to convince him she falls in love and fearing for his death, Cobra decides to help him by giving him a helmet possessed by the god of death. She leaves an axe and the god possessed helmet, in the forest Once Gath touches it, the dark helmet had sprung forth tentacles and before he could realize what was happening, he was enveloped by the tentacles. The horned black helm's glowing red eye's fixed on it's host, and he could not fight its grip. Once enveloped the tentacles covered and entered his body, fusing the helm to him. The helmet gives Gath godlike abilities while also torturing him. He manages to gain help from various people he found in the forest, and learned to control the helmet. Gath then fights the Kizzak horde, as a one man army and wins.

Looking further into Frazetta's work and methods I found a feature from a past Imagine FX featuring Jean-Sebastien Rossbach demonstrating how the Frazetta style of art could be translated digitally. The process is similar to traditional oil painting which I am a bit familiar with from a couple of my precious projects. Being able to translate this work flow digitally is something I have been wanting to learn since I started working digitally.
The tutorial from the magazine details the process from previsualization, through to the final product as well as using paint textures to give the painting a more traditional look and feel.

Imagine FX - Magazine Tutorial Work Flow Video

Initial Research

Mood boards showing a selection of Frazetta's worksbased on The Death Dealer (Top) as well as a selection of his other Sci fi and Fantasy paintings.

The purpose of this exercise was to improve my digital line work as well as start to redesign the characters from my old college project. Through doing this study I have figured out how to set brushes up that produce clean, smother line work. Also through a bit of research into Illustrator I have discovered the "Live Trace" tool which when used on black line work can be used to tweak the final thickness, tapering and smoothness of the line by using presets or by individually adjusting different values individually.

While I have found this a valuable case study i do feel that doing this digitally is far to time consuming for me at my current level of proficiency with a graphics tablet. A more time effective work flow for this style of art would be to ink the lines traditionally then scan the work in, separate the line work from the background (which is very quick to do as it turns out) then process that through Illustrator before painting in colour and tone.

Style wise I am fairly happy with this work, I achieved a style roughly what I was aiming at however I am looking forward to taking these further and into a more realistic art style which I will explore next. 

Design wise I feel these serve as a decent starting point for the characters but I want to develop them further. 

The characters are based on an idea for a comic book series. The story follows the exploits of a team of intergalactic bounty hunters in a future when humans are considered as one of the lowest species in the galaxy. 

My Chosen Brief

I have chosen to work to the brief for Concept and Pre Production Design. I feel that this Brief will really push me to improve my digital painting skills. 

The Brief Outline:

This unnamed film is set in the gritty and violent world of Frank Frazetta’s ‘The Death Dealer’. Your task is to develop 3 professional quality concept scene images which describe 3 potential scene designs for the film. The producers are keen to retain the classic Frazetta ‘semi-realistic’ style but they will allow creative license as long as the atmosphere and mood of the project is underpinned. They also mentioned the existing popularity of gritty realism in entertainment appeals to them.

Frank Frazetta's painting style has always been something that I have aspired to after seeing a selection of his work based on Conan in this book (below). Thanks to mum and dad many moons ago.

The majority of the time my work revolves around character or environment design, this brief will also prove a challenge to work in this context which for some reason very rarely happens. As a result of this i feel that I have missed opportunities to produce finished digital paintings portraying full scenes and this brief would be ideal to get a start on adding this type of work to my portfolio.

One of my goal since starting to paint digitally is to translate my knowledge of traditional oil painting to digital media and I feel that this brief will give me the opportunity to explore this further.