Sketchbook Notes: Frontier-Fantasy Firearms, and Wyit's Mark (Patreon)

Hey everyone, got a little peek at my sketchbook here, stuff I probably won't post publicly for a while (and not in high-res anyways).

On the left page I was trying to work out the signature firearms of the Fenathkans (the long ones on the left), and the Sabelians (the short ones on the right). These props don't feature heavily into the main characters', but they appear often enough in the background that I needed to make them look nice.

I think my short notes should be pretty self-explanatory, but basically I was trying to come up with something that says "frontier-fantasy carbine". The Fenathkans (which Wyit and Rek are) are a very "spacious" minded people; they have long snouts and long obnoxious tails, so they have a thing for airships with long hot rod-esque engine-blocks, and long guns. Started with an Armalite and Mauser Pistol-like shape, then worked downwards from there.

Trying to avoid the sterile mass-produced "FPS armory" look and give them little personal touches while keeping it simple enough to draw quickly.

Still working on making the Sabel's small machine-pistol type guns look less real-worldy since right now they're too blatantly Uzi-like. The IDEA is that they're meant to be single-handed guns used in close quarters fighting (like inside cramped airship corridors) while the other hand might be wielding a sword. They're a lot more "compact" in character than the Fenathkans; which makes sense since they were probably a burrowing/warren-colony people in primitive times. The design is still not quite there, so expect some more development on this later.

Sometimes I have to draw these things a dozen times in dullmode to understand why the shape works the way it does, THEN I get an idea on how to magic it up.

Also, confession time: I hate drawing realistic firearms. It reminds me of how much I dreaded cleaning those things for like 4-5 hours after every range when I was in the Marines.

And finally on the right, some visual notes about Wyit's mark he gets on his right hand, and how its changes affect him based off the decisions he makes in the story.