Concept Designs (Patreon)

Many of you have been asking for a closer look at how we come up with our creatures and characters, we're pleased to oblige with a closer look at the concept art design that went into the Vampires.

We've got a whole gallery of concepts to share with you, but let's take a much closer look at the process we went through to create the Cryptstalker, one of the larger horrors from our January release.

The Cryptstalker design was created by Alexei Popovici, who you'll already know as the Grandmaster and Overlord of the Bestiarum (Art Director), and Daniil Tumanov, our incredibly talented Concept Artist - Daniil joined us Full-Time last year, and has been an invaluable member of the team and keystone of the development process ever since!

Let's dive into the development!

Phase One

Daniil comes up with a selection of thumbnail designs, based on a written description and Moodboard that we'll prepare for him - these descriptions are often the same as you'll find in our Lore PDFs.

Alexei works through these, offering feedback and edits for Daniil to nail down a design he's satisfied with.

Phase Two

From there, we narrow it down to a single preferred choice, which is as hard as you can imagine from seeing the awesome selection Daniil gives us to choose from. It's actually not uncommon that the thumbnail process sparks into many different characters from a single prompt.

Daniil and Alexei then iterate through a variety of different designs for key details - things like faces and armor that will bring out the personality of the character or the true nature of the beast... 

Final Design

From those phase two designs, we'll either iterate a little more or settle on our final design for the character. 

Then Daniil will create a larger, more detailed image ready for our sculptors to work from!

Detailing

After settling on the final design, we'll often do a final series of iterations - experimenting further with things like armor and clothes - the relationship between areas of high detail, like faces, and flat textures, like armor, have a huge impact on creating an effective composition at a miniature scale.

With the Cryptstalker here, we actually chose at this point to diverge a little and create a larger boss-type version of these Bat-winged horrors alongside the Trio.

That about covers the concept design process, from there, the sculpting can begin in earnest! Comparing the concepts to the finished sculptures really highlights how important this process is in a miniature design.

Thanks for checking out this Spotlight, we hope given y'all a clearer insight into how these terrors come together every month! We hope to share some more of these with you in the future.

Cheers,
Bestiarum Team