THE DUKE

Sorry for the lack of posts, been grinding away at some projects. Anyways, this is some more Daxter and Jak stuff I did last year. Here we have one of the main bosses, Duke Skyheed. The brief basically described the normal Duke turning into a "Hulk" of a creature. With that in mind I did my usual preliminary sketches to give the art director a wide variety to choose from.

A lot of these I was playing around with posing, proportions and attitude just trying to find the life and personality of the creature. I was alos tinkering around with how the clothing would rip and really wanted that to be designed well and not just haphazard tears in the clothing here and there.







All of these sketches are pretty tiny so I can move through iterations faster. Once I build a design vocabulary in my head, then I get into details which I did in the head studies below.





After the art director picks the one he/she wants, I proceed to provide them with a final clean design before moving on to color. This differs from studio to studio but most of my clients like this stage because they can see the design clearly without a lot of over rendered goop atop.







Not always, but sometimes I do quick color comps just to work out a color scheme for the character. This is super loose and I only spent about 20 minutes on this.







Lastly, final color and any minor tweaks here and there.



I do not think they used my version in the game but that's the nature of the business, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. Remember, your job as the concept artist is to provide design solutions for the art director to help them create the visual world they are looking for about the game. Best piece of advice I got from one of my design teachers was...."Do not fall in love with your work, its always gonna change once you pass it down the pipeline."

Easy to say but hard to do.