Greetings travelers, and welcome to another character art piece! We once again worked with Wern Szuen Lee on this latest character art, and he brought the consistently great talent that he brought to everything that preceded it.
I’m of course talking about Icarus, our winged elf who has survived on Tellest since the times before The Fall. We’ve got a few pieces of art of Icarus so far, but with this latest piece, we bring him more in line with the contemporary timeline that he is in now. You’ll see he still has a youthful face, even amongst his race, so this might not be 1:1 with where he is now, but we’ve only seen him sparingly in the current timeline. In any case, Wern tackled him with a great first attempt, and nailed down the physical characteristics of most of him almost right away. The only thing we knew that we needed to change was the wings, as they looked a little too devilish (especially in combination with his pointed ears and slightly reddish skin here), and in any interpretation we had before, the ethereal wings were always blue.
We went a bit farther in the opposite direction in the next take, with the wings having an otherworldly glow that looked a bit too unlike the ghostly wings he would have otherwise had. While the blue radiance nailed what we were looking for, there needed to be some definition to them, as they look like real wings, just semitransparent. You can also see that Wern began working his way down, putting more polish on the character, from his armor, to his sword.
We were nearly to the finish line with this last piece, as the feathers did in fact become more defined here. Making your way down the rest of Icarus’s body, you can see the level of detail on his legs and his cloak, as well. We did make some other slight last minute adjustments though.
The wings felt a little too blue and glowy, so we pulled that back just a bit, and then we also lightened the hue of Icarus’s face as well. The red didn’t quite seem right, all things considered, so giving him a paler look made him feel more in line with a fair-skinned elf.
That ended up wrapping us up for Icarus. Wern gave us what feels like one of the best Icarus models to date, and really gets to the heart of what he brings to the table. You can see bits of valor and determination here, and more closely than ever, we get a sense of what these ghostly wings appear as.
We collaborated with Wern for many, many more characters after this, but it was the next one that closed out a special series for us. Join us in a few weeks to see the final character he tackled.
Michael DeAngelo
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