Initial Faction Portraits

At a stage where me and Adam were experimenting, referring back to Tim's design philosophies and trowing possible design ideas out there. After reading the Marauders design philosophy, I attempted a character head-shot:

I am pleased with how this marauder looks very sickening. He is battered and bruised, pale skinned with an unappealing reddish hue around his facial extremities. I studied Jack Nicholson's face from 'The Shinning' to get the possessed eyes and flaunted teeth expression:

I also like the greasy haired approach. Although the Resistance are known to don similar mohawk haircuts, theirs are groomed and maintained. This character's is greasy and toppling over, made unattractive by slithers of stray hair. It gives are more dirty rocker feel, as if the Marauders lack a sense of personal hygiene.

This character headshot gave us an idea. With the group presentation approaching, it requested that I produce another two character portraits for the remaining two factions:

Reference.

It was nice to study a different angle of the head and face, looking confidently down on the camera. The pose suggests confidence and potentially even subtle arrogance. There is this idea also that Resistance soldiers customise both their Mechs and Bodies with roses and county flags, so I overlayed a Yorkshire Rose image on this characters neck. I tried to keep mainly with the blue and green colour theme, the purple then standing out and making the eyes pop. I wanted to draw attention to the eyes here, to give the feeling that this Resistance solider is staring confidently straight at you with a strong intimidating gaze. I don't know if this is simply due to the absence of the lingerie clad suggestive body, but I feel my image isn't overly-sexualised, which pleases me as we want to break away from gender stereotypes. The soldier here seems not sexually suggestive, but instead strong and confident.

This is my first attempt at the SOI portrait. The respirator is based on the old fashioned dive helmets from the moodbord, with ornate gold trims and religious iconography (the crucifixes). Here is the feedback I got when sharing with the group:

I agreed that the spikes seemed too cliche and villainous for the SOI, but was happy with the tanned brown and gold colours. I decided to go for a full helmet approach, leaving only the sinister red eyes visible beneath the industrial attire, making the character seem almost machine-like:

I felt this to be an important moment in the groups dynamics, as it was the first time I had had to respond to feedback, painting over an image I had submitted as a finished piece. It is easy to get precious with the your work, but ultimately the feedback made the piece stronger in my opinion. The head piece now appears as an old fashioned welding mask with the thick soft material and goggles, with the ornate respirator mouthpiece. The paintover also gave me the chance to tidy up the perspective on the (character's) left respirator piece, as I noticed it was a little off.

On a final note, I adjusted the background colour to have more reddish hue with the Marauder portrait. This helped clearer define the colour theme of each faction ready for the presentation: