Project page 5 | Art of Jia Ling

This is a character created for a Multi-player Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game concept called Khaos Spiral. The final character's idle animation is later animated in Spine 2d.

I wanted to try something different for the project so I decided to choose a fantasy horror genre based off a culture I had not worked on before. My character, Arkom, is based off a Thai ghost, Kuman Thong.

I also chose a simple sketchy cell-shaded rendering style so I could spend more time experimenting in Spine 2D that I had not tried before.

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Arkom

Concept Art, Illustration, Spine Animation

Project 5

Thumbnails

I experimented with various baby types and silhouettes for Arkom. Since the idea was that he was a wandering sorcerer consumed by the weight of his crimes and dabbling in sorcery, he would be old and frail, I chose to use the thumbnails where he is hunching over. I chose the floating and crawling babies which are more stereotypical for ghosts.

Sketches

From the hunched thumbnails, I chose to further refine the more humanoid versions since I felt that the more mutated versions were harder to bring across the idea of Arkom originally being a normal human and the hair and lumps on the body already sufficiently brings across a ghastly feeling.
I chose the staff with flowers to hint at the ritualistic offerings often given to Kuman Thongs.
For the baby, I chose the crawling variations since I felt that the character was getting too top heavy and babies stereotypically crawl which shows the baby ghosts' innocence.

From this project, I have gained confidence and interest in spine-typed animations and using the program Spine 2D. I also got to try a style and genre different from what I usually do.