This week is gonna be short but sweet. As I’ve mentioned in my sporadic #CrowdPleasers columns, my favourite kind of reward, while not always in my price range, are the ones that let you add something creatively to the product you are helping to support. As I love drawing and doing character design, this is most fun for me when I get to submit not just a written bit, but a piece of art, for the project’s team to do with as they will.

The first campaign i funded at a level that allowed me to design a character was the International Incident expansion for the World Wide Wrestling RPG. For this campaign I submitted a Pro-Wrestler named “Boss Oni” Ryotaro Mitsuhide.

Originally Koga Mitsuhide.

The character design I submitted was one of the first times i tried to define shapes and shadows using heavy crosshatching in a long, long, long time. I’m not very confident with my inking and cross-hatching, it looks too unnatural on average.That being said, I feel that this image marked a certain landmark in my art, where my confidence jumped up another notch and I again pushed myself to try new poses and foreshortening ideas. All a work in progress.

I really like this design, it’s pretty rad and I wanna draw him some more.

In the final result, my written description of the character appears next to the game’s roster artist’s interpretation of my design. The cool thing here is that i asked the creators of the game if I retain ownership of the character, so he may just appear in other places in the future.

This is how he appears in the book! Quite fun.

Now, this next design never got to make it into a game. It was one of the options from different members of the Indivisible Strike Force on Facebook, a group I created to help coordinate the fan effort to help get Lab Zero Games’ Indivisible campaign successfully funded (and, with the game funded and many brilliant updates provided to backers, i would be remiss if I didn’t say that they are still raising money to hit the last stretch goal). Different people submitted designs for the group to vote on, as one member kindly donated an NPC creation tier to be the group’s mascot in the game.

I particularly like the feathers in his cap.

The pose isn’t much, but this was a fun design where I looked up a variety of different reference images to help inform my design. I feel like this design has some great potential for cool action sequences. Since it lost out to another design, I guess I’ll make a home for this fine feathered freaky fella in something else, where steampunkyness will fit.

I know this isn’t a bunch of art, and the #SketchbookAdventures may need to dig deep into the reserves for next week’s article. Keeping up with weekly blog writing and full time employment in a draining job has gotten me a little behind where I’d like to be in creating some new content in my sketchbook. Particularly considering some of my latest stuff is literally part of a comic project that I am hoping to launch within the next calendar year. As such i don’t wanna spoil it too soon. The #SketchbookAdventures portion of the blog might get a little less jam-packed with images as the last several weeks have been.

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