Team Chow II - Team Milk of Amnesia

[fluorine]

Member: Burtzum, Fluorine, Maoi, and Nightblue

[fluorine]

A small logo to put on the corner of the piece.

[fluorine]

Some Tibetan costume I collect over the years. I really love tibetan costume, it's bold and primitive.

[fluorine]

this is miao people, they'er famous for their skill with silver.

[fluorine]

this is アイヌ, 虾夷人, a minority people live in the north of Japan. I really like their patterns.

[fluorine]

This is 高山族，native people in Taiwan. Their costume is very similar to South east asian people.

[Burtzum]

colors, shapes, textures. inspiration boards. I like to draw from nature for costumes, vehicles, architecture, anything really.

[Nightblue]

You dudes rock :|

Posting some animal photos, many of which taken by national geography.

[Moai]

Hey, team members! Some great reference has been posted already. I'll add to the pile.
I periodically raid Wikipedia for costume and cultural references. Here's some stuff from South and also possibly East Asia.
Most of what I'll post is from Wikipedia. Some of the images I've gotten from reference threads here on CA. If any of these images are copyrighted, I apologize.

[fluorine]

cool faces! I love different faces.

[Moai]

And now for some people and artifacts from Mesoamerica and South America.

[Nightblue]

Sweet, Moai! Glad to have you aboard been following your work since I first got here.

Ready to kick some ass...

[fluorine]

memo to Moai~

all three of us are on MSN brainstorming tonight, hope you can get on with us tomorrow night~ we're like constantly asking, where's Moai? when will he get on MSN with us...so...here's my MSN ID:

feifei_w[at]hotmail[dot]com add me so we can chat.

anyway, just a short memo for you, so you'd know what we're talking about... between constant sidetracks about various unrelated subjects (such as frog legs, grasshoppers, some guy's girlfriend, star war, MMO....) we did come up with some sort of idea:

1, instead doing people, it might be interesting to create a humanoid (or non-humanoid) alien race. So it'll be some kind of sci-fi theme.

2, this alien race could be a combination between feather/fur and fish/reptile.

3, we want to mix up different ethnic costumes with this race (that's why all the costume reference).

4, this reptile race is cold blooded creature, but living in a cold environment, so they'll need constant heating system, or they'll be easily frozen to death.

that's about what we came up with tonight... so we decided to go and draw some concept sketch and see if this idea works. If we can't come up with cool sketches, then we need to change concept.

and we also come up with something that we decided to stay away:

punk, steam punk, goth, high fantasy (you know the lord of the ring type, pointy ear fantasy), general european style, Mass Effect style space marine, Blade runner style...

and Burtzum specially emphasis on "weird". we want to create something unique, weird, mixed up, mismatch, bizarre...

so that's about sums up what we brainstorming tonight...Hope you can join us tomorrow~~~I'm sure you'd have some cool ideas as well.

and once again, those faces are cool~~~

[Nightblue]

Random alien sketches over lunch... trying to get my mind out of cliches.

[Moai]

Thanks for the memo, fluorine. I just installed MSN messenger and created an account, so I'll join you guys tonight. My handle on there is corytregoart[at]live[dot]com. I've already added all of you guys to my contact list, and I'll be online pretty much the rest of the day, probably.
The alien idea sounds cool, and I'm totally with you guys on your ideas of style and genre. I have a few alien races that I've already drawn that I feel might work, but I'm guessing that you guys probably want to create something new for this activity. So, I'll sketch out some new ideas today and post them later.

Until then, here's some Tauregs, Masai, and other tribes from Africa. Only a few images this time.

[fluorine]

random sketches #1

[Moai]

Here are the alien designs I was talking about earlier. I have no problem with us using these or modifying them. Or, we can make something new. Makes no difference to me.

[fluorine]

more random sketch #2, 3

[Moai]

Here's some doodles!
Very interesting designs, fluorine!

[fluorine]

Another quick random sketch. just to play with primitive and sci-fi.

[Nightblue]

Doodles of nakkid aliens. Clothed ones comes later, maybe.

[Moai]

A pencil/digital sketch of some sorta humanoid alien. It doesn't really fit the tribal/high tech aesthetic we decided on, and the interlocking ring motif on its garment looked a lot better in my imagination than in practice. But oh well! Just adding it to the pile.
Cool aliens, fluorine and Nightblue.

EDIT: Reading the topic and guidelines, our initial direction is in the trashcan anyway. Growl.
So long, bipedal aliens. Adios, high technology. We hardly knew ye.

[fluorine]

Moai, that alien is totally cool!!! that being said, we're totally screwed with our initial theme/direction.

Well, since I can't find you guys on MSN and whine about this round's high fantasy theme, I'll just post it here.

So we all read the briefing for this round, and I hope I'm not the only who felt just a little bit disappointed...as if we actually *need* more pointed eared gender-confused elven cleric. But not like there's anything we can do about the topic. So let's see if we can still have some fun with this one.

I was thinking, maybe we could do some really cheesy Anima Style high fantasy characters, like those in Final Fantasy series. you know, high school kids saving the world, the girls wearing huge armor but with belly area totally exposed...that kind of silly style. I think as long as we stick to the AD&D rule book, we should be able to get by with "style".

Or we can do different ethnic, like African American elf, or Chinese drawf...just try to break away the "all white cast" of most High Fantasy stories.

Looks like the costume is pretty much limited to medieval/celtic/general european/LotR style. So I think if we can tweet it a little bit here and there, give it more ethnic look that might be interesting.

As for work flow, I think the most natural way is that each of us pick one character, race and class, make sure we end up with 2 male and 2 female. So each of us end up doing 2 portraits for this character, and we'll have 8 portraits all together.

It might help if we can come up with some kind of coherent background/world setting, it'll help to connect the characters.

I'll go ask Daestwen if we can do different poses, like moving, walking, sitting down...or we have to stick with standing pose. Although since we're doing good and evil side of the same character, it's probably near impossible to have a composition that have all of them fit in together. So I think at least have the two side some how interact with each other.

Bottom line is, this is not straight up "character design" we're doing here. I mean, there's no character sheet, no expression sheet, no breaking down sheet...What we're doing is straight up full panel illustration. So I think Illustration is to tell a story. Maybe we can push from this perspective, and have our character tell a story of themselves and the world they live in.

Add: one more thing, I just noticed the banner, Good and Evil. That seems to be the focus of this round. Showing the same character in different alignment. maybe we should be focusing on that as well.

[fluorine]

Here's a quick sketch I did this afternoon.

[Moai]

I was disappointed with the topic as well. But, we can still apply creativity and originality and make it work, no problem.

To respond to your thoughts on style, I'm pretty strongly against going in an exaggerated, Anime-influenced style. I think going in the second direction you mentioned--high fantasy with strong non-European influences--is much more interesting, more fun, and more similar to what we'd already had planned. That's my view.
I'll most likely be available sometime tonight to chat on MSN. I also think planning out some sort of world and backdrop would be helpful.

[Burtzum]

Well here are the doodles I had done for our primitive sci-fi idea. I was bummed about the topic also. But I think we can still make this weird and interesting. It will just be more difficult. I have some ideas. And I think we can still keep our influences. We need to chat on MSN. Also I'm with Moai, I am against going anime with bellies exposed etc. Bleh.

[fluorine]

Memo for tonight's discussion

1, Cory has established a nice background story:

In the beginning, there're 2 deities, the god of light and god of dark. they dominate 2 parallel universe, in one universe, the light god won; in the other universe, the dark god won. Eventually, these two universe start to merge, forcing the two side of the same character facing each other.

2, we decided to go with the direction of tribal people meets animal. We want to keep the feature close to their conventional race (human, elf, dwarf...etc.), but we do want to have an animal/insect undertone to make the design look more interesting. draw elements from animals, insects, that's looks appropriate to their living environment.

3, There's nothing specific assigned to anyone yet, everything is OPEN. sketch up characters from whatever race you find interesting, combining whatever elements from animal, insects, various different culture. But always keep in mind of form and function, make it realistic, and practical.

4, We'll have to decide what exactly each of us wants to do by the end of next week, which is Sunday August 9th. We want to decide the world setting, character background story, character gender, race, age, class.

5, We can go crazy with our design but do be careful with "high fantasy" requirement. Don't get too far away from the stereotype. it might be a good idea to ask Daestwen to look at our preliminary sketch later this week, and see if the direction is good. the last thing we want is creating bunch of awesome characters only end up being rejected.

(If that's the case, we'll just go with it, and screw the requirements. we all end up with some cool portfolio pieces anyway)

6, some ideas include: elf-insect-desert-thieves. mole rate dwarf, monkey human, seagull human, crayfish org....once again, we're not drawing a org that looks like a crayfish. but rather a org that looks like a conventional org, but has armor accessory facial structure that borrows elements from a crayfish.

That pretty sums up what we have discussed tonight. Sorry if I missed anything... Please post your sketches, thoughts, ideas... This is the most exciting part of creating concept art, let's go crazy and have fun.


PS: I just read the briefing again, looks like we CAN create our own race and class. So there's more room for us to get weird and crazy.

[fluorine]

Here's something I came up today.

Race: Swamp Giant (=Org)

Class: Battle Bard

Gender: Female

[Nightblue]

flourine: That's really cool! I think her pose would look more dynamic if she looks up at the camera

Random face sketches. More to come, for realz.

[fluorine]

I updated the pose, Nightblue, thanks for the suggestion.

also add 2 facial designs.