Character Design – Liche Priest Part 01

Posted on 2011/10/23 at 19:38 by daarken 20 Comments

Part 01

In this tutorial Daarken takes you through his process of creating a character for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. From start to finish, you will be able to see and hear Daarken’s thought process of designing a character from an existing IP and how he goes about adding color to a black and white concept.

The actual painting took around 8 hours, so this video has been sped up considerably.

Finished concept.

Note – This video was filmed back in 2007 and only the 640×480 files survived. The audio is a little quiet too since the recording equipment wasn’t very good.

20 Comments on "Character Design – Liche Priest Part 01"

Edward · 2011/11/12 at 12:13 · Reply

Awesome tut, really learnt a lot =) Thank you =)
nathan · 2011/11/16 at 02:16 · Reply

i’ve been following you for some time now, following you with each of your many blog and/or website changes :) i’m a huge fan of your stuff for warhammer online, though i despair when i realise that so little concept art ever sees the light of day – for every piece that is released there must be so many hidden away. such a shame.

thanks so much for your hard work in this site – keep up the good work
- daarken · 2011/11/16 at 05:33 · Reply
  
  Thank you so much! Yeah it is a real shame that most concept artists can’t show their work. I have SO many environments I did for Warhammer that will never see the light of day. I also have a ton of concepts for other games that we pitched that will also probably never be seen. Too bad.
Leo · 2011/11/19 at 15:37 · Reply

Hey daarken. Quality work would definitely be an understatement here, great stuff. Parts 1 and 2 of this video yield a lot of useful information that I’ve started to apply to my own work. But, beyond working in PS, I was wondering what programs you use to record/make your videos. I think it’s cool to be able to document your process of working in any field, so I’d love to know what you do for that. (I’m on a Mac, by the way.) Thanks!
- daarken · 2011/11/20 at 02:08 · Reply
  
  Thanks! I also use a Mac and I use a combination of Camtasia and Screenflow. I’ll also use Audition for audio sometimes.
Tim · 2011/11/20 at 11:15 · Reply

Hej Daarken,

i’ve been watching your videos in Youtube an i’m really impressed of your darwing skills… your art is amazing and i often ask my self how u get this nice texture to the skin or the armour.. it looks like real skin or metal… i tried it out but i can’t get this kind of texture… does it tepend to the brushes (than please could you tell me where u got these brushes) or do u paint this texture into te piece by hand?

please let me know.. cuz i would like to explore more in digital drawing :):)..

have a nice day and keep up the good work

ps: sorry for the mistakes bud i’m austrian.. :D
- daarken · 2011/11/20 at 14:58 · Reply
  
  Thanks for the message! I always just paint my textures by hand. Sometimes I will add a texture overlay of just abstract shapes, but that is just to add a little noise to the painting.
Paul · 2011/11/21 at 04:16 · Reply

cool ;)
Robert · 2011/12/04 at 16:11 · Reply

hey have you seen that app for the mac called muscle pro II? would you recommend it for anatomy?
- daarken · 2011/12/04 at 18:42 · Reply
  
  I actually just bought muscle pro III for the iPad. I have heard that the computer versions aren’t as good because they didn’t upscale the graphics any, but I haven’t tried it on a desktop. The program is pretty cool, but geared a little more towards students in anatomy class and medical professionals. It is cool that you can rotate the body horizontally, but that is the only axis of rotation, which isn’t ideal for artists. You can also remove different layers of muscles and there are some videos showing how the muscles work. I also bought the skeleton version too, which is pretty cool. Again, you can only rotate horizontally. If this program had full axis rotation ability, this app would be awesome. I wish I had this app back when I was in college.
CarloV · 2012/03/24 at 08:24 · Reply

What about brush settings?
I noticed 100% for flow and opacity. Do you use pen pressure on opacity?
- daarken · 2012/03/24 at 10:25 · Reply
  
  Yes, opacity jitter is set to pen pressure.
Sean · 2012/05/14 at 17:05 · Reply

This is the most amazing work I have ever seen! I hope you plan on uploading more tutorials. Seeing the entire process is what really helps. I would hope they could be a little slower though. Thank you for sharing your amazing talents!
- daarken · 2012/05/14 at 22:25 · Reply
  
  Thanks! Pretty much all of the other videos are filmed in real-time. The reason I had to speed up the Liche Priest video is because back when I made it many years ago, YouTube wouldn’t allow longer videos.
Sang Hee · 2012/08/14 at 05:30 · Reply

Hi.
Just had to thank you for all the videos you’ve put up. They helped me to improve dramatically.
I hope that some day you show how you painted the dark elf sorceress and the mind flow behind respecting the elven anatomy.
- daarken · 2012/08/14 at 11:35 · Reply
  
  Thanks! Unfortunately I won’t be able to show how I painted the Dark Elf Sorceress because the process was never recorded.
  - Sang Hee · 2012/08/14 at 12:44 · Reply
    
    Ah, that’s ok, then. I’d like to ask one thing, though. In case of Warhammer, what did you use as a reference for the pictures? Was it just a text description or did you use the pictures of miniatures and/or illustrations from the rulebooks?
    - daarken · 2012/08/14 at 20:42 · Reply
      
      Since we were working on an existing IP, we had to keep to the existing designs which meant we had to use the miniatures and illustrations as the base for our designs.
Javi · 2013/07/17 at 23:39 · Reply

Hello Darken this is Javi, i just wanna say thanks alot for all this great
Help pal u are just amazing! Thanks! Now Question, ive been practicing
The black and white process and i like the results, but when it comes to
Color and use the different layer styles (Multiply,color, etc ) i end up frustrated
Cuz i cant seem to have control over my color know what i mean? What can i do?

Thanks for your help!
Zizu · 2014/07/16 at 20:48 · Reply

Hey..amazing stuff! I had a question, how do you avoid muddy values if the opacity is set to pen pressure? I can’t seem to get the required values with pen pressure on.

I’d be really grateful for some pointers, thanks!