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By  Danny Staten
The Birth of a Project
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Sketches
I was initially contacted by a client who requested a special piece for a card game. He needed a deity design that dominated eight elements.
The elements were: life, death, earth, air, fire, water, chaos and order. The deity had to be gold, and he wanted it to have worshipers preferably on a planet beneath it.
I spent a good time brainstorming on different ideas. I played with ideas in my mind that were largely different beasts spliced together for all the elements.
This however, was not in harmony with my impression that the deity not be implicitly good or evil. I felt that a beast creation would be scary and
convey an evil idea to most viewers. I decided to go with a human figure that controlled the elements. From there I decided to do a female because I wanted
a more graceful creature, and the wings were just added for touch. The first sketch to the right is the rough idea I sent my client. He liked it so much that
he told me to go ahead with it, and even asked if we could expand the piece to use for the packaging art for his game as well. I was pleased that my initial sketch
impressed him, and that he wanted to use it for more than just a limited edition card based solely on the start sketch.
Initial concept sketch |
slightly improved
plus elemental explorations. |
The idea was to have the deity holding a skull (death), embryo (life), lightning (air), forest (earth), wave (water), fire (hmmm), and to have the stars and nebula represent chaos and order. Then I chose tomake the worshipers be the lesser deities for their elements. They are: a reaper, an eagle, a spider, a tree, a winged man, a fire, a scale bearer, and a dolphin.
I accidentally discovered a trick that I really started to like. I did the initial concept sketch with a few blank pages in front of it in the sketchbook. So from there I inked it in
and would trace its shape on the next page in front and refine that. It saved me a lot of time redrawing the general idea, but it also locked me into some
anatomical errors that the start one had. So that is a nice trick, but be careful with it too.
The next group of sketches you can see are all pages from my sketch book where I used the paper to explore my deity design and anotomy, using leftover space
for the elemental designs. I explored things like attempts to have the skull sit in her hand correctly, though for lack of a good reference I could not pull that off.
I also did studies of how the worshipers would stand on the planet with simple cylinders where each would be. Most of these studies were rough, but I wanted to make sure
that I had a good start.
Refined wings and
more elemental sketches. |
Sketches of hands. |
Planet sketches,
perspective sketches,
elemental sketches. |
reaper, eagle, embryo sketches. |
I then took the sketches that I liked and spliced them together in photoshop. I saved myself some time by using symmetry on the wings and arms. This was
the point where I focused on the piece composition. I tried to design the piece so that it would nicely lead the eye around the picture but still focus on
the deity.
Final sketch
References Collected
Not all the references I collected are shown. I had at least two photos for most everything I painted, and up to five or six of some things. I refered to anatomy books, and lots of other photos as well. A digital camera can be a huge help for getting pictures
of specific elements that you want to get right. I did that for each of the arm angles, as well as for the hands. I also use a lot of books I have collected.
For this tutorial, I used one of my favorites all about Bald Eagles to find a good photo of the Eagle, though that photo is not shown. I cannot overemphasize how important
having good reference material (often called scrap) is. A good quote is, "you are only as good as your scrap."
Arms |
hands |
planet |
planet |
embryo |
embryo |
fire |
jungle |
lightning |
lightning |
space |
wave |
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