Crimson CHOW Challenge #51 - The Bone Weaver
#1
-=THE BONE WEAVER=-

The Bone Weaver is a shamanistic figure who collects the bones of fallen creatures and weaves them into powerful talismans or even re-animated warriors. Design your best interpretation of how this character might look. Feel free to include visuals of the talismans, or re-animated warriors / creatures. 

Below I have included a Marko D'jurdjevic image for inspiration. 



Contest Rules:





  • You must post at least one WIP in the WIP thread to be accepted into the final poll.
  • Finals must be posted in the finals thread before the deadline.
  • Only ONE submission per person in the finals thread.
  • Must be original work created for the challenge.
  • Work may be 2D or 3D*
  • Voting will be held for 5 days after the deadline.
  • In an event of a tiebreaker, a winner will be chosen through a randomized name picker.

*Rules for CHOW forbade the use of purchased or downloaded assets not created by you. However, since using them for environment concepts is so commonplace and expected nowadays, particularly for trees, rocks, vegetation and so on, I think this is permissible for 'generic' elements.
Deadline is Monday, May 20th, 2024 @UTC: 23:59
 -+|| WIP THREAD ||+-

LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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#2
Thanks Lege for the cool briefing!

Here is a rough first ideation of the concept. 
I plan to develope some type of spiritual character.
I am not 100% convinced with the idea of a smoke cone and tribal tattoos.


Attached Files Image(s)


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#3
TrashPanda: You're very welcome and I'm glad you like the brief; it's always somewhat of a challenge trying to choose a topic that the majority will appreciate and enjoy, so I'm again very glad you do.

Lovely work and very interesting topic that you have brewing here. You have obtained some pretty interesting reference as well. I think the tattoo addition to your character is especially great. Definitely looking forward to seeing further developments on your concept here.

LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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#4
Ooooh I like this subject...I might give it a go and see how terrible it will look.

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#5
Damien Levs just do it and show us how terribly good it will look =) Glad you like the subject indeed!

LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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#6
My Attendance record has been shithouse lately, I will have to cram my current projects and see if I can participate!

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#7
RottenPocket Great to see you here as always and it is always a real treat, and privilege, to have you participate in any of our forum entries. Looking forward to your interpretation of this topic!

LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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#8
I haven’t drawn anything in a few months now and I need to kick back into gear. Hopefully this challenge will get it going again and snap out of this funk. 

So my 7 year old daughter got to dissect owl pellets at school this week and since she likes to help dad out with some ideas every now and then we couldnt help but think an owl would make a great bone weaver. Perhaps using his ability to consume and reanimate using his regurgitated embryos. Bringing back to life a concoction of disfigured  ghouls.

Not sure the direction I will take just yet but threw out a few doodles to play around with while I try to get the motivation to get the art juices flowing again.

@trashpanda great start I love the pose of this one, looking forward to seeing your progress.



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#9
CBinnsIllustration- Just wanna praise how effortless those thumbnail seem to have came out but my guess is that it as to do with how much black was use and how much was left for interpretation. There also something about strong silhouette that just make anything sell itself.I also like the variety of angle and gesture and that you didn't just come up with one design but many.Your very rounded in your fundamental and it show.

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#10
Ok...here's a start. This is quite a daunting task, but, there's no getting better without doing. So...here's my reference and some very rough sketches for the idea. 





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#11
Cheers @Darktiste, I very much appreciate your comments! I do enjoy the thumbnail stage to get the imagination flowing. Treating it more like sculpting than drawing and carving out a vision from 50% black and just using contrast to create something is really quite fun and allows for all kinds of happy accidents. 

@damien, nice start dude! Looking forward to your next update. 

So I had a lot of fun with mine this weekend mostly due to having some nice free time with both kids being at a weekend camp. :) so I decided to go for a book cover format for my Necromancer Owl/Bone Weaver to tell a bit more story , still got some elements I want to play around with on this one. But sharing progress so far.



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#12
Happy to be a part of it, opportunity allowing! 

I'm pretty sure this counts as couture. Thinking about submitting it for Best Accessorized Outfit 2024.


Attached Files Image(s)



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#13
Ooooh sheeeet. RottenPocket that looks amazing. It reminds me of those Seducers from The Elder Scrolls. 

Great starts by everyone...looking forward to this. I'll reply in greater detail when I'm not at work.

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#14
(05-02-2024, 07:01 AM)TrashPanda Wrote: Here is a rough first ideation of the concept. 
I plan to develope some type of spiritual character.
I am not 100% convinced with the idea of a smoke cone and tribal tattoos.

Slight Tangent - it reminds me of a Book series, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Similar magic if not aesthetic, they capture souls in incense burners over the battlefield of the fallen, then reanimate/create new forms for the souls using Bone and Gemstone to conjure. 

(05-06-2024, 10:35 AM)Damien Levs Wrote: Ok...here's a start. This is quite a daunting task, but, there's no getting better without doing. So...here's my reference and some very rough sketches for the idea. 

Yas my fellow found-line friend - although I would suggest restraining the urge to erase and instead increase tone as you sketch - use an eraser to chisel into forms for highlights or negative space. Erasing in broad areas leaving all lines really pale can make it hard to distinguish form, and in traditional media, it even leaves a residue on the page I found, making it difficult to then build value.  Please come back with moar lines. 

(05-06-2024, 12:49 PM)CBinnsIllustration Wrote: So I had a lot of fun with mine this weekend mostly due to having some nice free time with both kids being at a weekend camp. :) so I decided to go for a book cover format for my Necromancer Owl/Bone Weaver to tell a bit more story , still got some elements I want to play around with on this one. But sharing progress so far.

Smart with the Book Cover layout! That's a double portfolio piece to look forward to.

I do like how you've included the ambient light from the torch - I know it's still early stages so I just hope to see some more atmospheric light and texture to the environment. 

-

I have had a stretch of insomnia and my eyes are bloodshot so I'm calling it a day - I have to jump back into another job later so here's what I have for now. I have to edit in some distortion to dramatize the form a bit more. I am planning for a background with a Bone creature to frame her in, so it will probably be more landscape format. 



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#15
Awesome work  guys; it's really great to see how this round has taken off!  Sorry so m.i.a. here, been caught up with work myself. Some really wild concepts and renders going in here! I finally got a chance to put something together and this is what I currently have......



LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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#16
THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN MOVED UP A WEEK TO THE FOLLOWING:
Monday, May 20th, 2024 @UTC: 23:59

LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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#17
[Image: giphy.gif]


...

I'll be fine.

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#18
(05-13-2024, 04:41 PM)Lege1 Wrote: THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN MOVED UP A WEEK TO THE FOLLOWING:
Monday, May 20th, 2024 @UTC: 23:59

Thank you! I was secretly hoping for this to be the case!

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#19
Ok, I'm starting over as we have another week. A very quick sketch, with a similar idea. I quite like the composition and angle here. But I am really struggling with those legs.

I'm hoping to achieve a comic book style drawing. Pencils, then ink. I think that's about as far as I'll take it in the given time. Hoping to work up more defined line work and some clothing etc tomorrow. 



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#20
TrashPanda: You were off to such a great start. Hopefully with the added deadline time you will be able to make a successful finish. I'm looking forward to your update.

CBinssIllustration: I really enjoyed all four of your black and gray concepts and liked the one you decided to go with the most. It's great to see you back on track with being visually creative again, and I know very well how things can go in life that either slow or hinder the process. Your over all concept is really nice and awesome that you were able to incorporate that quality time with your daughter into your art; family and relationships are important, these are true things to cherish in life.

The color / rendered version looks awesome and I'm really enjoying the lighting on this one along with your very spooky night time color palette. I like the book cover format although the main character looks small in the overall image. I'm interested to see if you crop the image to make the character appear larger in the final, or if you add more to the over all image and keep it as a whole. Great work always from you! I'm curious to know more about what you mean when you mention 50% black to do your concepts, is the 50% referring to your brush flow?

RottenPocket: My first initial reaction to your sketch was being super impressed with the concept alone, and the anatomy and what appears to be either really good traditional drawing on paper, or well done super imposed digital sketch work on paper texture. I really love the over all costume design of your character especially with how you treated the head of the character, the shoulder armor, and the mid-chest jewelry and adornments. Your cleaned up coloring and gray tone flats really have this piece looking fantastic without any shading which is going to make for a very powerful finished image when you do further rendering. I feel this is an important aspect for us all to take note that if the image can look this good at this stage it will only look that much more amazing once the value, and color are added.

Do you add your gray flats in straight away, or proceed directly into doing color flats, duplicating the layer, and then desaturating the original while keeping the duplicate layer as some form of transparent color layer to overlay your base colors over your grayscale work once value entry is complete? I'm just curious as this is something that I have been experimenting with myself and it seems to work rather well. Either way, great work, and sorry about the deadline extension; by the look of your meme you didn't seem to be to happy about it, as my educated guess was that you were probably putting the pedal to the metal to meet the deadline which I understand can be disappointing. Majority seem to have been behind this round so that is what made me pull the trigger in adding the extra weeks time for everyone to sort their druthers and hopefully bring their images to completion.

Damien Levs: Really nice start on the new image and so far it seems like it's coming along well. Really try to lock in and see to it that you can follow through with the further steps of image making to hopefully bring this image to completion to deadline; I'll be looking forward to it =)
---------------------------------------------------------
***UPDATE***
The finals thread has been posted!

Here is some progress on my image, I have really spent a bit of time noodling away here and of course experimenting with different things like layer modes, brush settings, and the fundamentals of image making per usual as I always strive to do somethings different to try and best make new discoveries and learn more. The image is coming along much different than originally planned but I'm liking it so far. I had planned for a more equally divided cool and warm color palette on this image but ended up letting the warms dominate a bit more. I often like to play around with color balance in the beginning of my image making process but skipped out on that and worked everything up manually thus far in this one, but will most likely adjust levels and do some sharpening in the post rendering.

The desire to really want to feature a bone built creature in this was strong but I went back and forth something terrible trying to figure out how I was going to do it without taking so much focus off the main character. I'm pretty happy though again with where things are at and have a good amount of work to still put in to really get this image where I feel I'd like it to be.

I put a lot of thought into the costume design of this character, kind of working from a tribal / indigenous type of vibe. After seeing RottenPockets entry I really wanted to try something different with the characters face as well and decided to give them a creature skull mask which I feel really gives the character a haunting and eerie feel. I find costume design to be really fun to research and rewarding to assemble, my whole dilemma is simply finding that happy medium to not over do it.




LEGEND'S SKETCHBOOK_001
To all artists struggling to create and are intimidated by A.I. (anti-imagination)
Sun "Everything has been done, but not by you" Sun
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