3 April 2012

Massively Effective Alien: Head Designs


A few of my buddies set up a new art blog, The Clockwork Ballroom, where we contribute artwork to a bi-weekly topic. The first theme we are tackling is 'alter ego.' As I have just completed Mass Effect 3 (and going through a bit of a sci-fi binge), I am going to be a complete geek and design myself as a Mass Effect alien!
This here is stage one of the process to a final concept painting. The brief I gave myself for theis design is to create a character that could fit into the Mass Effect universe as a squad member in Sheppard's team. As an ally to the protagonist, I wanted this character to carry clues about his allegiance (with generally soft flowing organic shapes) and the ability for him to pull a variety of expressions for the players to be able to relate to. In each design I try to restrict them to one unique motif. Imagine if you try to cram too many ideas into one design, you'll get creatures with 3 sets of eyes, 2 nose and a mouth on top of it's head, it would just be too many ideas fighting for attention.
Since this is a alter ego of myself in the Mass Effect environment I still need to relate the design back to me somehow. My thought was to give the design a dragon flavour with my alias being Bendragon and all hehe. A potential problem I was cautious of was avoiding falling into the realms of fantasy creatures, you can decide for yourself if it stays in science fiction. The design set #3 all originated from the same drawing. I chose this drawing as it was the best fit for my criteria, and then produced a few more variations following the same philosophy. I will take 3b to the next round so stay tuned for more!

4 comments:

Badger said...

Looking nice benoooo

Pete said...

Hey! Cant access the blog : P

Ben Ho said...

Oh yeah, the link was to an old address. It should be fixed now.

Anonymous said...

Great, cheers mate! Will grab a celebration beer when you move to london town :)