It may be darkest before the dawn, but the night is still young for Caliban.
What brings the spark to his madness? Was there a plan behind the menace?
Lets walk down the list step by step to establish what questions were posed, and what answers were found by exploring the character through his design.
Let’s start off by thinking through this character. Let’s try ‘Caliban’ a classical villainous name, but with some modern twists. Let’s also run with a meta-theme about the natures of entertainment. Carnivals of chaos that attract an audience only to destroy them by the end.
Since we already have a drawing that goes to the description, lets establish some visual themes to our character. We can start by exploring some colors and textures to the fabrics.
Sure, Caliban may be a half-demon prince running a hellish halftime show, but lets reinforce this with some mystical and creepy tattoos.
Here we have a final contour of our proposed character. He has form, name, and story. Now we have all the framework to define a character in a world. All that’s left is to flesh out our monster.
We kickstart off our machination by making a decision to paint our antagonist a textured painterly style, or a smooth contrasted linear style. Lets explore each by focussing on the extremes of each as much as we can without losing the image. Seeing the differences to each, let’s borrow elements from both, and move forward with hard edges and tactile textures.
The best way to ensure a character is fully developed is to view them at every angle you can. This way you can establish any and all necessary detail, leaving nothing to improvisation for any pose.
Now that we have a character, a name, and a story, we need to show him in a proper setting that also fits the character and his story.
We illustrate Saliban walking down stairs, so the sensible thing would be to paint some stairs.
We need to establish the background. If this is a modern twist on a classic villain, then we need to set this somewhere plausibly modern. Lets establish some more artificial colors like a muted blue-green.
Let’s establish that this is a wall, likely concrete. We can also add some chains and splatters to emphasize the dark nature of this production.
Let’s add some curtains to reinforce that this is a stage for a theatre. The folds in fabric really help shape the curtain.
We can add shadows to the stairs from angles drawn from each of the firey light sources. This off-side lighting can reinforce the heavy shadow that plagues our villain.
