INTRODUCTION

I’m Anna Berill Bartal, a young aspiring artist currently studying 3D Animation. I'm mainly focused on concept art and world building while I work on my personal projects in my free time. In this tutorial, I take you through the steps of the creation process of Nevermore, the villain I made for Art War 3.

THE CONCEPT

For Nevermore –  as you can probably tell by her name – my main source of inspiration was one of my favorite poems of all time, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe.

There were a few things I already knew before I started to create my character: 

I knew I wanted to make a villain, a woman with a royal appearance. Also, I really wanted her to have a pipe, which then helped me greatly to push the idea forward.

Before drawing anything, I started brainstorming by asking myself questions over and over. As example:

• Who is she?
• What is she like?
• What would she do?
• But most importantly: what pose, what outfit, what shapes (and materials) could represent her personality the best?

Then, the rest came from itself: What if her superpower would consist of controlling smoke, coming from the pipe? What if she would have hair and skin like smoke? What if she would be like smoke itself?

The idea started to quickly take shape in my head and I felt ready to move on to the thumbnails.

I made a basic pose first and sketched out some outfit ideas I had in mind. I thought that a long leather coat along with some golden, pointy armor parts would be a perfect fit for her character, so I made some variations based on that idea. I love to exaggerate some parts of the clothing – like the boots and the glove in Nevermore’s case – because it makes the silhouette more interesting to my eyes.

It’s important to make sure that everything you add to a design has a reason.

After I have chosen the one I thought would be the most fitting for her, I started to clean the sketch up and made a lineart. I drew the back view of her design along with that as well.

Color

Then, I started to think in colors. For the royal feeling I wanted to achieve for her, I thought that a simple color scheme of black, white and gold would probably be the best choice.

The first variation was the original idea I wanted to go with, but did a few more just in case I find one that I like more. I ended up using the first but with applying some small modifications, like the white undercoat, brighter pants, darker vest.

I took my time to think everything through regarding her appearance once more. When I was 101% sure that this is what I want her to be, I started to render the drawing out a bit.

After her design was done, I made some quick thumbnails to show her abilities. I thought about giving her wings (a reference to ravens, also to provide her with more mobility), swords, a shield as well as a short bow and arrows, which she could form out of smoke.

ILLUSTRATION

I imagined a dynamic scene where Nevermore emerges from a dense cloud of smoke during a battle. My aim was to make the illustration as simple as possible with no detailed background – I wanted to avoid adding too much information and let only the character speak.

First of all, I did a rough sketch and kept adjusting the pose until I got something I liked. I have applied the colors right after. The main goal of this was that the composition is set, that the general idea is understandable and  that I have a solid base from what I can work.

I kept adding more and more detail, fixed what I didn’t like, allowed myself short breaks where I didn’t look at the illustration for a day or two just to see it with fresh eyes again. I spent more time on her face and her right arm while leaving the detail level of everything else rather low, so she can stand out well from the background.

Eventually, I reached a point where I thought I could consider the illustration done.

Final

And that’s how Nevermore was created! I hope you enjoyed reading through and that it might be helpful for some of you.

Thank you for your attention!

Kind regards,

Anna

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