Final Piece Development

 22/04/21 - Week 29

To start, I took my chosen colour and started to add some layers of shadow and highlights to result with this. This is how I usually render human figures so this was not too challenging for me. I then collapsed all the layers and began to render out the shading. I went for a strong back light as I felt it was a bit more descriptive of the lighting of the arena itself - I also made the lighting a warm yellow/orange to also imitate the arena lighting. I think this lighting is pretty impactful and I am pleased with the way it turned out in the end.

As I got more into rendering, I slightly changed some of the features such as the chestplate and the bottom of the dress as I felt it wasnt working as well as it could, but these features definitely helped to add some more detail. Here, a lot of the lighting has been rendered out significantly and the piece was starting to look much more like I wanted it to. However, I did slightly struggle with some of the rendering such as the sword and red jewels, I don't render this type of material much but I feel that I eventually got to a good place with the lighting and texture by increasing the contrast and adding some more accurate highlights. I also struggled somewhat with the metallic objects but these just take a little more time for me to figure out as they are more reflective.

As I came to close off the front view, doing so by increasing a lot of contrast in quite a few areas such as the wings to create a more dramatic look and improving the texturing on the sword again to make it look as good as I could make it, I moved on to the back view. I didn't have too much of a plan for this area but I decided I wanted to place some gold detailing onto the back, I ended up going with a cross as I felt that this had some contextual connotations. I decided not to also include the sword and scales since I felt they were accurately described in the front quarter view already, so to save some time I just went with the main body. At this point I was starting to notice that the boss wasn't exactly how I imagined and I became concerned that the boss wasn't "evil" enough and was a bit inconspicuous which wasn't really what I wanted.

After adding some more detail to the back, I was still thinking about the previous comments and have started to consider some options on how to approach adding some quick and convenient details to make the boss look a bit more evil looking. I want something that isn't too hard to work into the piece since I have already almost finished it. I think a good way to do this would perhaps be to adjust the wing shape or add something to the face that is a bit more menacing, I am currently thinking that a mouth of some sort of lots of eyes could be the way to go. I don't, however, want it to look out of place or over the top as the face being blank adds some amount of mystery that I want to keep. I will think on this more and do some tests then eventually finish this piece soon.