"This turnaround has me feeling a bit witchy" or, Concoting a Witch, Part 2

I haven't gotten as far as I would have liked for this week, but!  Dream Witch's turnaround is done and she is already in the process of being modeled.  My tasks for this week included working on Dream Witch's turnaround, the Booty Paladin's turnaround, and beginning to make an environment sample.  Needless to say,  the turnaround gave me hell all week, and I haven't yet gotten to the latter tasks.

Why was this turnaround so very difficult for me?  Well,  my original intent was to become a comic artist, and so I majored in Sequential Art for two years until I figuratively skipped town on that dame and jumped on the Game Development boat as a last resort to stay in art school.  Therefore, my only experience with turnarounds were strictly for concepts.  In other words, having a pretty good idea of what the front view, side view, three-quarter, etc views of a character would look like within two dimensions: on paper.  Sure, landmark items conceptually lined up,  everything looked nice and pretty, and like it would all work out, right?

Problem number one: 3D space is a thing that needs to be worried about.  A character can not be faked to look pretty from one angle and completely different from the other for dramatic effect.  For comics, characters are never going to turn to face the reader in real time, or move at all for that matter.  In a 3D space, all of that becomes very possible, and probably WILL happen, and all of that needs to be considered.  Sounds simple enough.

Enter problem number two: the turnaround for Dream Witch is being handed off to another artist (Hank) so that they can model her.  To this outside source, educated guesses for what things look like are going to act as literal guides.  Because Hank doesn't know exactly what my intentions are, he is - to the T - going to try to match the turnaround as best as he can.        

As much as I would have loved to hand Hank the picture above and told him "good luck," I knew that Dream Witch's clothes, anatomy, and physical features really needed to be further laid out so that she can turn out to be the best witch she can be.  And because she has so many layers, the turnarounds below are broken up into parts. 

This turnaround is her basic dress, socks, and boots, and gives off a pretty good idea of her body type.  I started off with her front view and then branched off into the side views.  One glaring mistake I made here was using her eye silhouette from the front and using it for the side of her face.  Although it matched up perfectly in the turnaround, when it was translated into 3D, she turned into a big creepy alien with eyes that stretched back into where her ear should be.   

The second turnaround layers her scarf on top of her dress.  Because her scarf will be acting as her arms, the scarf is drawn similarly to how her arms are spread out. 

One layer up is her cloak that covers most of her dress and hides the source of the scarf.  You probably don't need me to tell you that the cloak doesn't match up at all.  It doesn't flare up high enough in the side view in comparison to the front view.  Hank hasn't yet modeled her cloak, but he will definitely have some questions for me.  And I will admit that at this point, I was sick of trying to match up every little detail with no real idea of how it would even translate into 3D.  At some point, I will definitely need to create a turnaround and model it out so that I can make a more accurate turnaround the next time.        

Finally, I added her mask and the bow bounding her arms on her back.  The side view of the mask is probably my weakest guess as to what the mask would look like in profile.  Her mask is definitely something I will have to see in 3D before I can accurately decide what it should look like.  But that marks the end of my long week of struggle...  

To recap, I've drawn almost nothing for this game BUT Dream Witch for a couple weeks straight, and I'm getting burnt out.  But now that I'm officially done with her for a while, she can be modeled and animated, and hopefully put into the game build by the end of the quarter.

Now the real fun begins, because I can start developing the environment style and what the rest of the game is going to look like!  Until next time....