Development Diary #23

A CREST FRESH FROM THE FORGE

The Kravix Crest is complete. I was burning with anticipation to release this, now stand back and gaze upon its fiery presence. Careful, you may get burned!

When the Forge Meets Fur

When I was doing the initial sketch work for the Kravix crest, I knew I wanted to highlight the Kravix's love of the forge with a Kravix head plastered in the middle of the crest. Once I finished the initial sketch, I knew I had the concept I wanted to move forward with. I did do a couple of more sketches after the initial one, but the head shape was just much more solid the first time I did it. Sometimes you get it right the first go around.

Forging Ahead Through Difficulties

If there is one downside to doing art digitally, it has made me a really lazy sketcher. I draw what I meed to get me started on the computer, and then I stop. This usually results in half-finished images or vague ideas of where I want to take an image, which I flesh out once I am on Illustrator or Photoshop. I've been trying to be more disciplined in this bad habit I picked up, and it has shown itself to be an issue with the Kravix crest.

I sketched a concept of the background, but not enough to give myself lines to work with in Illustrator. Because of this, I spent too much time trying to figure out what I actually wanted to do with the background. The best option when this happens is to open Photoshop and resketch the missing elements so I can finish in Illustrator. Unfortunately, I didn't have my tablet around for this, and I had to rough it with the Illustrator shapes until I got it to a point I was happy with.

So Much Hair

I finished the vast majority of the crest relatively quickly, but I spent an insane amount of time obsessing about the hait and then avoiding it until it was the last thing I had to work on. Once I got into a rhythm it wasn't too bad, but getting there was definitely a challenge. The difficulty with hair and fur is finding the right level of detail. Too much, and you're drawing every single strand, which could never be seen by a person, or too little and it all looks like a flat blob. For me, the Kravix crest falls in that happy medium.

A Fiery End

The Kravix crest marks the end of my crest journey (yay). It has been long, but rewarding, and I'm really happy with how they look on the website. Now that the crests are done, I will shift my Illustrator/Indesign effort to formatting, rule book design, and web development. I've already done some experimenting with Adobe Premiere, and I'm excited to play around in After Effects to give the website some shine. So that's it, I hope you enjoy the Kravix crest and all the crests I've worked on, and I hope it builds the world of Kingdoms of Immacus a little bit more.