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I’ve been participating in the Hurakan challange over at the Art Order Blog.   Art Order is a blog by senior Art Direction Jon Schindehette of Dungeons and Dragons and Wizards of the Coast.  He very generouly offered tips, insights, and this cool contests.

We started a few weeks ago but the basic concept is to design the Mayan God, “Hurakan” with the Dungeons and Dragons universe in mind.  Then we’d proceed to create a book cover.  That challange only has a few weeks to go but I thought I’d post my progress.

Here are the list of assignments broken down.

Phase 1 character silhouettes (completed)
Phase 2 character thumbs (completed)
Phase 3 Black and White detailed character drawings & compositional Book Cover thumbnails (completed)
Phase 4 Character color roughs & Black & White Book Cover detailed drawings (completed)
Phase 5 Final color Character development & Book Cover color rough
Phase 6 Book Cover Final

Here are the silhoutte based on the character brief (seen here).  You can also read all about the challange in that same link. Doing silhouettes is a really underrated way to begin character designs and really just drawing in general.  It allows you to focus on the actual design of a character without worrying about the details of the drawing.  In basic drawing it forces you to deal with overall shapes and picture compostion.  It’s just a great way to distil down and focus on some important aspects in the beginning of design or drawing.  I liked these three out of the dozen or so I did but as luck would have it I ended up going in a completely different direction.  More on that in a future post.

I’m going to spread this out over a few posts as I don’t want to post a novel here in one setting.