Halloran House Concept

I made the concept for Halloran House back in 2019 if I’m not wrong, for the Tales platform.

If you’re not familiar with it, Tales makes interactive stories for mobile devices. The story lines are consistently well written, captivating and imaginative, so I was always happy to contribute to the visual side of their content.

From 2017 to 2020 I made a huge bunch of artwork for them, and Halloran House was the location of one of the tales, set in New Orleans.

There’s not much I can tell about the project without spoiling the story, unfortunately, so I guess you’ll have to play it if you want to know more.

Anyway, the briefs for the stories always came in batches of 10-12 illustrations each, so I was forced to be quite time-efficient to avoid spending three months on each story.

This is when I started introducing photobashing in my work.

For those who are not familiar with the procedure, photbashing is the practice of combining together bits and pieces from existing pictures, then to tweak colours, values and all the rest to make a coherent composition.

It’s fairly standard in concept art, as it’s very time-efficient and it allows you to save the time you would waste on minor details like, I don’t know, power outlets or door handles.

Despite it being accepted and common practice, I always feel unreasonably guilty when I bash together stock images. So I always end up using them only to have a believable perspective grid and overall palette, and then I compulsively paint over as much as I can.

The end result is always something in the range of 85% painted and 15% textures and pasted details, which is a good mix between the realistic and hand-painted look I was after for Halloran House.

I was toying with the idea of making a big giant post with the whole load of concepts I made for Tales.
Then I changed my mind thinking it was better to post them one by one, so you won’t have the impression that I only make Star Wars things.

Long story short, I’ll sprinkle them here and there on this space in the weeks to come.

by Paolo Puggioni

Freaskhow – Zaquida

I’m at the end of the concept stage for Freak Show, and I’m wrapping up the designs for some of the main characters.

Zaquida was the first one I made, so last week I went back to that first concepts page and applied the changes John and I had discussed aloing the way.
To be honest we were already quite happy with her face, but I hadn’t designed any of the clothes or thought of her overall look.

Despite her being a transh-human, Zaquida comes from a Purist planet, so before I could even think of her design, I had to figure out more things about the general aesthetic of Purists in general.

Purist society is harsh and authoritarian, and as you can see in the previous concepts, it imposes modesty and sobriety.

I figured Zaquida’s look should be consistent with those principles, but with some “twists” in her attire to account for her rebellious spirit.

For example, if Purists would always cover their necks and heads as a sign of modesty, Zaquida would stubbornly refuse to wear any headgear.
Where revealing any skin would be considered inappropriate, Zaquida would discreetely do so as a sign of defiance.
She would also wear some piercings, where those kinds of accessories would be considered too frivolous in her environment.

Basically I meant her to look extravagant and rebellious enough to her peers – as a consequence of her being a natural “free spirit” and somehow on the fringes of society – without going as far as making her look like their equivalent of a Punk.
Nothing too much in-your-face, so to speak.

For this reason I kept the rest of her clothing quite standard when compared to the local fashion: ample clothes to hide the shapes of one’s body, asymmetric tops, arm sleeve to carry wearable devices and so on.

I think I’ll pick the one with the yellow coat.
Its colour would be a further sign of her individuality (purists in Freak Show would mostly wear dark and colourless clothes), and also serve as a cheap device to make her stand out in the panels.

So there you go, Zaquida’s official look.

Next drawings about her will be style studies, that is, how she will actually be in the comic.
I have to confess I’ve been dreading that bit for a while, but it will be another couple of weeks until I start with that.

by Paolo Puggioni

Freak Show Generic Characters

After the first batch of sketches for Freak Show, I am now moving on to the main characters.
It’s not like everything is set in stone, but I thought that now that I have a general idea of how most things would look like in the first panels, I could start focusing on better defined character pages.

I meant to work on Zaquida first, then I realized that, as she comes from a Purist world, her look should at least partially reflect the kind of aesthetics you’d find in that environment.
Which is why it made sense to explore further the kind of clothes that people from Purists worlds would wear, before I committed to the design of a main character.

In video games you would call these NPCs.

There are a few features I deemed fundamental in these designs, and which will be a common trait of all Purists in Freak Show.

The first one is that I’d like their attire to be conservative: as little revealing as possible, modest, no embellishments.
Most characters would wear some sort of head gear as a form of modesty. Purist society is supposed to be authoritarian, so their outlook should reflect that.

I thought they would also wear ample, baggy clothes to hide the shape of their bodies, as you’d espect in a society that doesn’t encourage frivolities.
At the same time I tried to use straight lines and sharp angles, to emphasise the “aggressive” nature of the society.
I’m not sure I got there yet, so I might have to make more work on this.
Along the way I accidentally came up with that sort of over-trousers you see in the two people from the right, and I decided I’m happy with those. So I think I’ll stick with them, maybe with some youngsters with slightly more liberal ideas in terms of fashion.

As you might have noticed they’re all carrying some sort of touch screen, which is a feature of their technology you’ll see later in the actual panels.
The design of the clothes and their asymmetry accounts for that.

This first detailed page wraps up a bunch of early sketches I had made a while ago, in which I outlined the main guidelines of Purists aesthetics.

So, next I might be working on the first main characters, or go on on these generic concepts, I haven’t decided yet.

P

Cyberpunk People

Before I finished off the cyberpunk lady I posted last week, I had started a few sketches for the same theme.
Just rough ideas, really.
I was caressing the idea of drawing a whole bunch of cyberpunk concepts, maybe tying them together in a consistent setting.

Then I immediately got distracted by something shinier that I’d like to work on, so I guess I’ll pause the cyberpunk thing and get back to it later.
That’s the beauty of personal projects after all.
You can have twenty of them going on at the same time and no one can say a thing about it.

So, here’s a sketch of some random cyberpunk people (ok this is not rough, I actually polished it a lot more than I should have).

As always, done in Krita!

The cyberpunk setting I had in mind wasn’t set like a million years in the future.
Let’s rather say a hundred years or so.
So I was thinking that in that case, most elements of our own culture and techology should still be recognizable.

The leg implants of the girl on the left are quite similar to today’s prosthetics, for example.

I took a few of the components of the winged lady from Shimano byke parts.

The old creepy guy works instead under the assumption that, in this setting, people’s life span can be increased almost indefinitely by plugging medical equipment into one’s body.

Impractical, maybe, and creepy, but better than being dead I guess.

Anyway, there’s actually another cyberpunk concept I had started working on, this time in ZBrush.

Since I’m slow as hell in ZBrush (I use it so rarely that I forget everything from one time to the other), I’m afraid that you shouldn’t hold your breath for that.

by Paolo Puggioni

Cyberpunk

I have to admit I fell to the hype for CDProjekt Red’s next project, Cyberpunk 2077.

The Witcher 3 was one of my favourite games ever, so I have to assume their new franchise will kick ass just as much.

Seeing their teaser trailer brought back my ancient love for everything Cyberpunk, together with memories of the throng of comics and books I read about it.

I even found an old link saved in one of my bookmarks folders, which led to the complete series of BLAME! (the exclamation mark is not mine, it’s in the title).
For those who don’t know about it, do yourselves a favour and give it a quick read.
The environments and the cyborgs in it are among the most imaginative pieces of art I’ve ever seen.
The mood and sense of scale of the entire comic are just superb.

Anyway.

Riding the wave of this newfound love for everything Cyberpunk, I started sketching something, and this is what came out of it.

Now, with cyberpunk you can go crazy in a lot of different ways.
With this one I meant to be conservative and focus on mood more than anything else.

Instead of tubes and cyber-augmentations and body modifications, I preferred to convey something different and through other means.

For example, the clothes indicate some sort of urban environment (as opposed to what happens here, where everything seems put together from a post-apocalyptic junkyard).

The snazzy glasses are obviously from a high-tech environment, whereas the old-style, vaguely ethnic bling is supposed to suggest another layer to the background.
Maybe a fashion coming from a society that contains elements from what are now developing countries, and that in the future might have a more prominent influence on world’s culture.

I’m quite happy with the level of finish (although I left the hair very much unfinished to leave focus on her face).
I’m still not 100% proficient with Krita, and I had to see if I could do something a bit more polished than what I’ve done so far.

Good God Krita is amazing.

Anyway, I have a couple more cyberpunk sketches to finish off, I’ll post them next week.

by Paolo Puggioni

Other Runescape Concepts

As I said a while ago, I still have a folder full of concepts I made for Runescape that I never had the chance to publish.

Unfortunately my memory is what it is, and most of the times I have just a fuzzy recollection of what those concepts were for.
(No, it’s not because I partied too much during the nineties, my memory was already shit way before then).

Anyway, I do remember that these environments were made for Ashdale, the new starting spot meant to replace the venerable Tutorial Island, which had been there since forever.
The game-play for new players was confusing at best back then (not a quality that a tutorial is supposed to have, right?), and at some point a couple of years ago we took on the task of reworking that part of Runescape.

To prepare for that, I spent quite a few weeks working on a 3D model of Ashdale on Sketchup.
Unfortunately I forgot to take it with me, so it’s kind of lost forever.
Which is a bit sad, I was quite happy with that grey box.

It took several weeks for me to fine tune the foot print to accommodate all the requirements of design and at the same time make it as pretty as we meant to.
Loads of plans, meetings, walks to people’s desk, tweaks and then other meetings and then other tweaks.
Sketchup is wonderful for that.

After we had settled on what went where, we started with the actual concepts.
This is a sketch I made of one of the big statues that now stand between the main island and the church.

Again, just a sketch, we changed the statues and the footprint a lot after that.

The following is instead a view of the South side of the island, with its quarry and the small pier.
I painted this on top of a Sketchup screen-grab.
That’s pretty much what I use it for when I’m designing complex environments.

I can’t find in-game screenshots of this bit, but I remember it being fairly close to the sketch, which always fills a Concept Artist’s heart with fuzzy feelings.

I also remember that after this I had to move onto another project, so other people had to finish the whole tutorial thing.

Bonus content: in the Concept folder I just came across the desktop wallpaper I had on my main machine for four years.
I present you THE BEST IMAGE ON THE ENTIRE INTERNET.
You’re welcome.

by Paolo Puggioni

Runescape Concepts: Godwars Characters part 2

Here are another couple of Runescape characters I did for the Godwars dungeon.
Now that I think of it, together with Graardor that’s all I did for this project.

Bree and Growler are both Commanders Zyliana’s body guards.

Zylyana has been designed by my good friend Dave, btw.

Commander Zilyana, Keeper of Faith, is the leader of Saradomin’s army in the God Wars Dungeon.
She is an Icyene, an ancient race of winged beings, chosen by Saradomin to guard his hilt.

[Again: source]

Bree, as you might have guessed by the four-legged lower part of his body, is a centaur.
He is one of the only three centaurs of the entire Runescape.
I’m told animators are quite happy of the race being neglected in our game, apparently they’re not the easiest thing to move around.
As far as I’m concerned I’m also quite content to keep their number as low as possible.
Horses are not the easiest thing to draw either, you know.

(Fun fact: artists have been crap at drawing horses in movement until Edweard Muybridge’s first action photos. There was obviously no way to isolate single frames to take reference until then. There’s an article about it on James Gurney’s blog. Oddly enough, being an old time fan of Muybridge’s work, I already knew about these facts. My brain has its own way to decide with information to retain and what not. I can’t remember my own mobile number, for example).

Growler is another one of the three bodyguards.
Apparently he is not much of a threat and Runescape players normally manage to kick all the Life out of him without breaking their stride.

Now, to be fair, at this point I should post the last of Zyliana’s bodyguards, Starlight, but I was so unhappy about the concept that I decided it should remain buried where it is.
As another horse-like creature, this unicorn is not so much to my liking.

The model looks great though.

A Brief History of Space Exploration – Red Cloud

Asteroid Mining, the first real step towards Space Exploration, became economically viable in 2045, when the cost of most resources on earth, close to being completely expired, spiralled out of control.

Copper started to be unavailable in 2045, silver and gold in 2048, nickel in 2040. At the same time the scarce fossil fuels were still required to power the common mining activities. This meant ordinary metals became luxury items.

Earth was, simply put, expiring.

Tensions between China and the United States grew worryingly, as the two countries tried to secure control over the few territories still rich in resources.
Europe was one of the first powers to be in dire straits and, as it happens, the first one forced to search for its own means of survival in Space Exploration.

The first telescopes aimed at finding ore in the Asteroid Belt had been put into orbit in 2013, more a scientific project than anything else.
A mission to study the feasibility of Asteroid Mining had been completed in the early 20s, funded by the unlikely partnership of Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and movie director James Cameron.
Considered an extravagant exercise by many, the mission proved that, however expensive, mining asteroids was in fact a possibility.

The first mining station, on the surface of Hygeia (the fourth biggest asteroid in the Belt, with its 500 kms in diameter) was finally built in 2058, a date widely regarded as the start of Human Race migration into Outer Space.

The European Mining Station (EMS) catered for 25 workers, had three surface crawlers and still relied heavily on food and supplies from earth.
Miners used to have 9 month-long shifts, after which they were sent back to Earth to avoid the various diseases linked to the absence of gravity.
The first Ring Station, built 12 years later and still orbiting around Hygeia, provided workers with an environment of artificial gravity where they could live between shifts, which in turn allowed more miners to join the facilities and a more intensive production.

The ensuing availability of automated machines, together with the wealth in resources, eventually made building structures in Space extremely easy and affordable. As a matter of fact much, much cheaper than building anything on Earth.

By 2065 a first depot was added to the complex. Two years later came the first ore processing unit, and after six years the first orbital greenhouse.
These were soon followed by a scientific lab, a fleet of new mining droids, an array of telescopes and a bigger water processing unit, plus the first meat production factory in the Solar System based on artificially generated animal muscles.

Soon the astronauts, who now spent long years away from Earth, started asking for leisure facilities, and eventually a cinema, a football field and a theatre were added to the complex.
The EMS, 40 years after its construction, housed nearly 320 miners, was almost completely self sufficient and sent about 45% of its ore need back to earth.

Four decades of mining had released a huge amount of dust around the mining facilities. The dust, kept together by the feeble gravitational field of the Asteroids Belt, was constantly lit up by the service lights of the many automated machines incessantly moving around, which gained the settlement the name of Red Cloud.

Red Cloud kept growing and growing throughout the 310 years it remained active, and after just 80 years since its foundation a vast part of its crew was born and had grown up entirely on it.
In 2075 one of the female engineers got pregnant, and since moving to Earth to complete her labour was considered too risky, the baby was delivered at the Station.

For the first time a Human Being was born outside their home planet, and from then on many others started considering this first human settlement in space as a viable place to live.
This event is considered by many historians as one of the most significant occurrences of the Colonization Era, and is still a major source of arguments for those who, in turn, regard the Foundation of EMS as the key factor in Space Exploration.

In the next chapter we will see how the troubled economy on Earth lead to the foundation of the Miners’ Guild, and began what is commonly known as The Grudge phase.
And all this simply to justify my need to practice on hard surfaces.
Here’s the process by the way.

by Paolo Puggioni