redpillklaudiaspiechowicz

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Looking back I feel this wasn’t my strongest project. I’m quite happy with the work I’ve done for it although I feel like I didn’t do enought. I chose to go with the red pill side of the project and started to deveop an alternate reality world where people can acctivate special powers by having a tattoo that alows them the access these said powers. And even though my concept was pretty good I don’t think I’ve had enough time to support it with the concept art that I made. I heavily focused on the character design this project as the storyline of the comic would follow a group of people that know how to use their powers and I wanted to bring in some characters to represent this group but on the other hand I didn’t have enough time to expand on what bloodtypes would determine each power, why, how the powers come to be and things like that. Unfortunately because of the situation we are in as I was making this project I couldn’t manage making as much work as I set myself up to do. But overall I wish I had made more concept art to support this project but I am happy with the work I’ve done, and I feel it does showcase the parts of the project I managed to include in these concept art pieces.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

After adding the shading and the effects of her power I put her side by side of my previous illustration showing off the previous two character’s powers. I don’t think it’s too much but it definitely gets the point about what their powers are to some degree which is good enough considering I chose their powers to be rather simple or even basic on purpose.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

To show of her powers I wanted to put her in a really dynamic pose so that you can already tell shes in motion just by looking at her. It was really difficult to do but I did look at a few references of dynamic poses as well as runners stopping to get the pose right. I don’t think it’s quite there but it’s hard to work with these ind of poses but I feel it gets the message across. I also went ahead and wanted to show the motion she’s in by giving her hair and hoodie drag physics to it, making them fly to the side to better showcase that she was moving fast but has stopped now and I feel this part of the drawing has worked really well.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Finished the thrid character design for this project and to be fair I don’t quite know if I’m sure how I feel about it, The design itself I feel works fine but half the times the colours throw me off. One time when I look at it I feel it works perfectly for what it’s supposed to be and the other time I feel theres too much going on and that the colours don’t work with each other too well.  And although aesthetically the character does suit the other ones I made it doesn’t feel like they are a part of the same group because this one just feels too vibrant compared to the previous two.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

I moved on to colouring the clothing and like with the previous designs, even though this one was supposed to be brighter and more colourfull from the get go I still wanted to keep a lot of the colours mainly black and white to more match my previous characters. But I also kept the rule of each character having up to 2 main colours to make them distinct and to contrast the bright pink I also included neon green details in this design line the shoe laces as well as the make up that really made the whole design look more fun and overall interesting. I also played around with having the main outfit be black and white and then the hoodie the darker magenta / purple but I felt that made the design feel quite simple and boring making the hair the only fun part about the design so instead I went with the first route and made the clothes purple and the details in grey tones.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Started colouring the character and at first I coloured in the flats with blue and navy blue colours so that I could later change them and have a play around with how I want to make the characters skin and hair look. I got the thought of making the hair colour a bright pink/magenta because like I previously mentioned I wanted this design to be way more vibrant than the other two I already made and having the character have bright dyed hair would definitely push what I was going for. I kind of strggled a bit with the shade of the pink because I wanted it to look vibrant but at the same time I didn’t want it to look too obnoxious / unrealistic so I went with a darker shade of magenta than what I intitially intended but I feel it still really suits the design.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Completed the line art on all the sketches for the final character. I quite like how the design looks like right now and want to push it further by adding some vibrant colours to it.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Characters with speed related powers:

I wanted to have a look at what other superheroes / characters with some sort of speed related abilities look like to get some inspiration for them and compare them to each other as well as my character.

Quicksilver (MCU)

Starting with quicksilver you can easily tell this isn’t really a ‘superhero’ costume which is exactly what Im going for with my character. It looks like hes basically wearing typical runner clothing instead of a full body suit which is something his comic counterpart would’ve worn and I really like this design choice. He looks like someone you could pass on the street but at the same time does give off a vibe with someone that has super powers which is my exact intent for the character I’m designing. I can also tell and so far this is a pattern with speed related characters that they usually have only one colour to represent their palette for example Quicksilver is associated with a darker shade of blue both in the movies and comics and on the other hand someone like Flash would be associated with the colour red.

Octane (Apex Legends)

I already looked at some artists that worked on Apex Legends for this project because the aesthetic of the game and especially what the characters wear in that game matches the one I wanted to create with my charachters quite a bit which made me think of this character. Again there is a visible one colour distinction ust like with Quicksilver but this time around instead of blue Octane’s colour palatte is mostly bright greens which can be associated with something like energy or high health especially in games like the one he’s from and it’s something I want to replicate with the colour scheme for my character. Bringt neon colours are heavily associated with having high energy as well as sports because most athletic clothing is made in those very colours and I’d like to do a similar thing with my hcracters colour palette.

Tracer (Overwatch)

Again here you can see the association with one single colour, although this character palette is much bigger than the previous two you can easily tell the main colour here is orange, again in a very bright variety supporting the point I made while describing the last character. I  also noticed it’s quite common for these types of characters to leave some sort of trace behind them to the point where Tracer’s name is literally a pun on that. But like I said every character I described here so far does this, Quicksilver left a blueish-white trace as well as in a way frames of himself basically moving behind him to show how fast he’s moving, Octane leaves a bright green and orange trail as he runs and tracer leaves a quick light blue mark in the air as she moves. I know this is done to in a way showcase how fast the characters are moving but I really like the fact that this as well as basically one colour palette they all share is something characters with these sorts of powers have in common.

Speed (Marvel Comics)

Unlike the previous rather bright colours representing these characters Speed has a dark green colourscheme to him, but yet again basically only one main colour to represent him. And like I mentioned before with Quicksilver he’s wearing that stereotypical comic book full body suit but I feel this wuld benefit his powers actually because wearing something like this would definitely reduce drag as he runs. I don’t think he was ever actually shown using his powers in any cartons or movies as far as I know but he did unlike the colourful trails of the previous characters I looked at left a trail of dust behind him to again showcase his ablities without directly telling the reader what they were in case his name didn’t make them obvious enough.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Target Audience For The Comic

From the beggining I intended these characters to be taken as concept art for a potential superhero / vigilante comic book comparable to something like Marvel’s Spiderman / DC’s Batman. Not quite to full extend but somewhere inbetween of those to as I don’t intend the story to either be too dark and grim but also not too lighthearted this is why;

1. My target audience would most likely be teenagers / young adults. I reflected that by making the charcters in my concept art reflect that age range as that’s what usually is what tends to happen. If the main character is female, male or even their age most of the time is a good indicator of who the target audience is and I tried my best to replicate that with my characters in this project.

2. My audience woulld also most definitley be comic book readers as this is the medium I am making the concept art for although this group of people has definitely expanded in the last years due to how popular superhero stories have become again. This would definitely secure a bigger audience for the comic if it was to exist.

I also took time to create a diverse cast (I didn’t have enough time to come up with many different characters but I did that for the characters I that I designed so far) as like I mentioned early on in this project characters in this group would come from all over the world because anybody could activate their powers anywhere, and I wanted the main group of ‘heroes’ if you could say that to reflect this choice. I tried to combine them looking different from each other but at the same time feeling like a part of the same group through the clothing that they wear. 

Also like I said I wanted the comic to have a futuristic feel to it therefore I made this push in the cast of characters in my concept art because I assume that most definitely this is what the future will look like for most people because it already does look like that in many parts of the world, and making this kind of decision will help people from all different backgrounds be interested in picking up this comic if it were to exist which is always a good thing to stide for.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Starting to work on the lineart for these sketches. I feel this was the hardest character to design so far because I put way more thought into what she would wear than the previous two. I wanted something that would fit the design style of the rest of the characters but at the same time be very visibly athletic sort of clothing but I feel I managed to achieve that quite well, and I’ll push this design further with a brighter color scheme.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Completed the other two sketches for the third character this time both more of a profile/ half body view instead of full body, similar to the ones I’ve done with the previous characters so far.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Finished the sketches for the full body design of the third character. So far I’m really happy with how the character looks, I can already tell this will definitely be the most vibrant out of the designs mostly because at least for me superspeed heavily links with athleticism and linking from that athletic clothes tend to have bright neon colour and I wan’t the design to reflect that.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

I realised two characters isn’t enough to show what kind of group and aesthetic I am trying to achieve with this cast and therefore I decided to design one more character for this project. And like before instead of making the character first and then chosing some superpowers for them I first picked a power and designed a character around that. And this time around I’m going to design a character that would have some sort of superspeed powers. I looked into characters I know from games and comics that do have these sort of powers and realised most of them wear full body suits for example characters like Quicksilver or Speed from marvel, but this isn’t what I was really going for as like I said I wanted the characters to look like they are a part of this group yet still pass as normal everyday people you’d see on the street. So I started looking at some athletic clothing as clothing commonly worn by runners for inspiration.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Continuing from my last post I did try to like with the male character allow the audience of this potential comic to assume her powers based on her character design especially through her oversized coat. I originally intended her to be in a hoodie because thats a obvious character design que of someone that doesn’t want to be seen but I figured it wouldn’t fit the aesthetic I am aiming for so instead I decided to give her a dark oversized coat that covers most of her body to in a way push the same message without being too in the face about it.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

After finishing the base illustration I wanted to move on to actually drawing the powers. Like I previously mentioned I intended the male character to have some fire related powers from the beggining and I described it quite a bit while coming up with his character design, meanwhile I didn’t really talk about the girl’s powers as of yet at least I don’t remember if I did. In that case I intended for her to have invisibility powers thats why the title for this supposed comic I chose was “Unseen” it would refer to her invisibility powers as well as the fact not only this is a vigilante styled group of heroes meaning they try to act without people knowing about them or their powers but also the reason that they hide their tatoos. Although I came up with the design for the tattoo all of them would have on their wrists I made sure every character in this projects somehow has it hidden mostly with sleeves or bracelets.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

Finished the lineart as well as the flat colours on the powers showcase sheet. Like I said my goal for this whole project was to make the powers as generic as they could get because everybody would’ve heard of these powers making the story feel more believable. For exaple here these two characters would have fire powers as well as the power to turn invisible, and i assume everybody has heard of these powers before from multiple different sources and thought about things like which one would be more fun / better to have, making these two more relatable as well as their powers to seem more possible to have in a way.

[redpillklaudiaspiechowicz]

I wanted to do another page where I would actually show what the tatoo and the characters powers will look like so I want to dedicate an entire sheet to just showing the characters powers. I also decided to draw the 2 characters I already designed togheter to show how they would look like in the comic to some degree.