Project #5 - Geralt of Rivia

My final project was a culmination of all of the skills and tools I have learned to use throughout my time in this course. I chose to illustrate a character from the Witcher series, Geralt of Rivia. I chose this as my subject because I really enjoy how well-rounded and thought out CD Projekt Red's team of storyboard developers made him. It took a lot of risks and artistic challenges to bring Geralt out from Andrezej Sapkowski's books to turn him into the character that many people see today. I spent a lot of time warming up for just the pose and perspective of the drawing, and I feel like it payed off well. I pulled many references from both the games and external renditions of Geralt, and decided to restrain my stylistic choices in order to properly draw this character. While I originally did plan cel-shading, I eventually leaned towards utilizing line weight and coloring emphasis to draw out pieces of armor and other parts of Geralt's armor. In terms of the type of armor and appearance for Geralt, I eventually settled for his iconic 'Witcher Armor' and tied-back ponytail, albeit with my own artistic liberties. I began this by sketching out form figures for about three pages to warm up, and then I moved onto this pose with the sword (which took about 20 minutes just to find a satisfying frame to begin the musculature/ anatomy). After this, I added dimensions to the skeleton, which is a concept I pulled off of Andrew Loomis. Eventually I was able to draw most of the musculature, and I began to gruadually erase pieces of it and draw armor or clothing over large amounts of it, although I immediately drew out the extremities with armor. I wrapped this up by outlining the drawing in my PITT artist pen.

Most of the research I did aside from references involved a large amount of anatomy research and how the body changes dimensionally at certain angles. I didn't really employ a specific type of perspective, but I suppose you could say that my project is drawn in 2-point perspective. You can notice this especially in the different faulds of the armor, such as the boots and pauldrons, and some parts of the gauntlet. The actual pose itself is a derivation from what the character is usually seen doing - fighting monsters; I settled for this because Geralt is otherwise a very expressionless and lax character. I pulled lightly off of Andrew Loomis' 'heroic proportions', but I adjusted the final drawing once moving on from basic musculature to properly portray the character.

My own goals and the project learning targets, I felt, were met very well by the end of this project. I applied every method that I felt necessary, and especially utilized my gained knowledge on perspective, musculature, body proportions, and posing to fully illustrate and convey a character in the best of my ability. Instead of incremental implementation of these techniques, I was forced to constantly keep in mind how to bring the Geralt together, which especially proved to be a challenge, as Geralt is already a character in a well-known IP, so my ability to draw him correctly had to be on-point in every manner of the term. Layering the arms and legs, especially in the crossed position I decided on, was also very difficult; it took about 2/3 of the project to get all of the line-art finished, and the extremities accounted for 2/3 of that in itself.

I had many challenges throughout the course of this project, but I feel like I have improved a lot in many ways having completed it. As stated earlier, drawing the hands and feet, as well as the rest of the extremities was extremely tedious, and many iterations of the same pose were drawn because of how I felt about how the hand gripped the sword, or the boots touched the ground. My largest problem, by far, was drawing Geralt's face with as little space as I gave myself. I had only about a square inch of space to draw facial features that would fully express that it was Geralt's face, and the eyes were incredibly difficult. I redrew the eyes about 20 times in itself just to find something that worked well to show his character; most of the time the eyes wouldn't even match one other. My personal goal in the future would definitely be able to minimize facial features, yet be able to obviously show who I am trying to illustrate.