Visual Arts and Animation: Steampunk Design

It was Steampunk week this week! Praise be! This task was awesome, got to finally visualise a character I've had in my story I'm writing for a long while now. My story is a fantasy/steampunk book, but for the sake of this task I ramped up the steampunk influence a little to suit the task at hand. I toyed around with a few concepts for this one, using a mood board of different steampunk games, films and books, but the largest influence for the style I went for for this one was a comic book I was reading at the time, which is why this ended up having a very distinct comic book vibe to it; this was something I actually really liked and I feel this is sort of my natural style. So for the character of Abbas, the seedy advisor to the King, I wanted a fairly regal and lavish appearance for him, so I made sure his clothing and colour scheme reflected that part of his character. In terms of his clothing, it is very typical steampunk attire, waistcoats, buttons galore, goggles, the usual, but I think I managed to achieve a fairly distinct aesthetic for him. I am very fond of his minature cape, and the general pose he is in; I spent a lot of time toying around with positions and poses, deciding whether to give him any weapons, but I think for Abbas, the thing that should be most evident is that his greatest weapon is his wit and intellect. He schemes and plots to get his own way, and his manipulation of the King allows him to rule the city without anybody knowing. He is blind, and uses a small mechanical bird as his eyes in the city. I quite liked the idea of making him blind, as it adds something to his look that I felt was missing. In terms of colours, I went for a fairly flat, cel shaded look, but I used the method of overpainting and overlaying textures to make his fabric very detailed, just to add some differentiation to the texture of his clothes. Overall, I think this is not only my best design yet, but also my best piece yet, as it feels very personal to me. It's nice to see ideas that I've had for a long time finally see the light of day now that I have learnt the means to effectively create them.