Character Design
RPG character
An RPG tank designed off a genuinely good brief: the sketch was approved on the first pass, no colour-correction round was needed, and one composition decision saved an entire lineart stage.
- Period
- 2026
- Type of work
- Character design
The brief
The client came to me with an idea for an RPG character. He already had his references in hand and a clear picture of what he wanted to see. When a brief arrives like that — the general idea, the references, the style — the work flows, because the illustrator is really a mediator between the client's idea and the finished piece.
What he wanted was an RPG character built as a tank: the sturdy type who opens the front line and keeps everyone behind them covered. White hair and beard, dark brown skin, a cape, a single plate pauldron, trousers and boots. Simple.
The process
He went with the package that includes a revision round, so I started by putting the idea down as a sketch:
Because he had given us so much to work with in the interview, the sketch was approved on the first pass — so we went straight to stage two, refining it:
Cleaning the drawing up here buys efficiency and quality once lineart starts. Lineart is, roughly, the “outline” of the drawing; done with the right hand it emphasises certain areas and gives weight to whatever the composition needs to say.
Since only the main character had to be finished, so that the head on the left of the composition carried the emphasis, that saved us a stage — and we moved on to colour:
Tap each stage to watch the art come together.
The result
Because we stuck closely to the author's original ideas on style and colour, we never needed a colour-correction round. The project came through approved with flying colours.