I was doing some more quick concept sketches. Here is a breakdown of this newest one.
First off, before anything else, I watched a bunch of professional wrestling. Specifically a lot of 'off the top rope' moves. I was looking for some dynamic reference and watching video is always better than looking at posed still images if you can do that. Peoples bodies do a lot of really strange stuff that no one would ever pose, but it looks great when you capture just the right frames out of a few videos and use those as your reference. With those references and some simple 3D models that I pose, sort of like the traditional artists wooden doll, I assemble a composition, and then draw it.
Now that I have a simple line drawing, I have to turn them into characters. In the case of this game I am working on, the characters are all about costume. So I dress them up. In the process I try to fix some issues I had with the original line drawing.
At this point I have erased a lot of construction lines and random sketches, but there are still a lot of lines that truck all over the place. I could refine them and erase the mess, Ink on another layer, or go straight to painting. I sort of split the difference here and refined a lot of edges, but since I will be painting over it I didn't ink all the lines or make nice clean line work. This is, after all, a concept sketch.
Got some tighter lines in there so I pick a very limited palette and add some color.
Is it done? Maybe, maybe not. The whole purpose of a concept sketch is to illustrate a concept. It's like writing a mission statement or broad outline. It only has to convey to the intended audience (in this case, me) what the finished product might feel like. I know this game is about a bunch of magical weirdos that roll around in balls and fight each other, but what is that exactly? What does that look and feel like? This is what I'm trying to find. Every drawing brings that concept more and more into focus.