The Flare Beast is a wandering monster that lives in the region known as the Windswept Desert. Within this desert there are a series of beacons, that when lit unleash unspeakable power. The Flare Beasts are the primary guardians of these beacons, chasing off any unwelcome adventurers that happen to get too close. They are described as wolf or coyote with a raging flame spouting from their backs. You'd think an idea this simple would be rather simple to design, but because the description was so generic it took forever to get come up with a design that everyone could agree on.
Here are the initial set of silhouettes for the creature. In this phase of the designing I started off with a couple of generic ideas, before trying to really explore what we could do with the creature. I really had fun exploring the character at this point, going from a skeleton demon, a cerberus, a lava dog, and even a fire spirit. The first thing that was pointed out to me was that the direction I was taking the design in was more along the lines of a hound, a big black shaggy dog type of thing. I was directed to think of the creature less as a hulking fire demon, and more of a creature that could be found residing in a desert, like a coyote or a wolf.
This is the next set of sketches I provided. To distinguish the character from a standard canine, I used this stage as an opportunity to play around with possible anatomy variations. I tried mixing in some more feline aspects into the designs at this point, as well as really pushing the shapes that made up its anatomy. Unfortunately, I was still thinking somewhat within the box of my imagination.
I was instructed by my art director to take the variations on anatomy that I had already come up with, and mix and match them. Basically frankesteining the different pieces of the various designs together. From these choices 4 and 5 were my favorites, but 2 was chosen as the final design.
The next step in the process of the design was figuring out a marking design on the character, and subsequently some color studies to get a finalized look for it. We ended up going with a mix of C and D for the markings, and A for the color studies.
Finally the rendering portion was started and finished, and huzzah! The character has been designed, and everyone was happy with how it looks. After the render was done, I was temporarily put onto a few other tasks before returning to the Flare Beast to complete the character process and get the card art complete.
The card art for the design went through a few variations before It was complete. To get the fire effects to look just right, I experimented with painting with a gradient map instead of painting the fire from scratch. This made getting the fire to look right incredibly easy, and really pushed the illustration.
As we get a little further along in the rendering, a big problem started to become apparent; I couldn't figure out how the lighting on the creature, from the surrounding fire, worked. This was really frustrating, as it really messed up my values, and made the lighting go all over the place. At this point in the illustration I could call the card art done, it was passable, but not great. Luckily my art director decided to step in to help me out and solve my problem.
By presenting me with this draw over, Josh Stewart (FI's lead art director) helped me figure out how to fix my value problem. It turned out I was sticking too closely with the original character design, where black and red flames were chosen for the design of the character. This design made the actual illustration for the character not work, and I couldn't wrap my head around how this kind of lighting would work. So, we decided to scrap that idea and go with a raging, brightly lit fire, instead, which would really make the illustration pop.
I took Josh's draw over, and chopped the illustration apart, only to put it back together even stronger than before. With the value change, the ferocity of the creature became apparent, and the entire illustration became a lot stronger.
This was a really fun character to work on and illustrate, I hope you enjoyed reading this post and seeing just what goes into a character design for Visions of Zosimos. Take it easy!
Ben Ramos, 2D Artist
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