Hackberry Hollow

We’ve shown Preston’s truck twice on the blog so far, and we haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out exactly what his truck looks like until recently. So here’s the current design for Preston’s truck in its full redneck glory.

Well, I don’t know about you guys but I figure I’ve let Glen and Adam have all the fun for long enough. So, here it is! What we have here is a nice bit of concept work of what we think that a limestone cave that is located near Preston’s cabin will look like.

Here’s some more concept art from where Preston lives. Earlier we spent some time talking about the first chapter of the comic and trying to solve some of the minor issues regarding how we introduced Derek the raccoon. We found a solution, and because of that we had to change the location and time of day that Derek and Preston will be introduced. So here’s a quick piece of environmental concept art for this significantly revised scene.

Here’s a couple of really quick concept art paintings. We’ve been working on what the landscapes will look like where Preston lives. We’ve decided to have the climate and topographical features be similar to the coastal areas of Northern Washington and Canada (with the requirement that the coastline has limestone rock formations).

We have most of the set pieces in the works for Chapter 1 of the comic, but the other big task—and by big I mean huge, gargantuan, colossal, and monumental—is the character design. Part of what makes this part of the process such a big deal for us is that 1) we’ve never had to create so many character designs in one project before, 2) they’re all animals, which is another first for us, and 3) about half of all the characters that are in the comic will be shown in the first chapter, so at the very least we need to have all of those designs finalized by then, and we’d also like to have the rest of the character designs figured out by then as well.

Given that, you are going to be seeing a lot of critters and characters in the future. The rest of this post will include a couple of pages full of sketches showing the very beginnings of my design process for Derek: Preston’s pet undead raccoon that he taxidermied up to look less undead.

Glen had a lot of fun with four straight weeks of ego stroking, so I thought I would keep him on his toes a bit by posting some of the work that I’ve been doing.

One of the main artistic goals in Hackberry Hollow is to have intricately detailed environments, but because we want to keep a strict production schedule we needed to come up with an effective workflow that would save us time without sacrificing quality. When we started doing concept art we realized very quickly that we were spending more time tweaking the underlying drawings than we were actually painting, and with three skilled modelers on our team it quickly became apparent that creating relatively detailed backgrounds complete with lighting would allow us to streamline production without sacrificing the nice painted look that we like.

Glen already revealed this part of our process, but what he posted so far has been experiments with the concept of using 3D mock-ups. Thus far we are very pleased with the results, so I set out to make one of the actual set pieces that will be used to create the final art in the comic. Seeing what we could do with quick 3D mock-ups for our concept art, imagine if you will what could be done with this:

This past Friday we had yet another exhilarating writing session for the comic. That’s right. Adam came up with a really neat idea. Previously the plan has been to only have glowing red or green eyes to differentiate between ghouls and undead. Now, what if these creatures had a visible but ghostly muscle structure as well? Not only would that look wicked sick, but it would help illustrate how the magic system works. But most importantly it worked like magical caulking to help us fix a potentially big plot hole in the story.

One of the design ghoals [sic] for our ghouls [hyuk hyuk] was to somehow show how the magic system works without having to explain it. The characters in the story do some very clever things within the restrictions of the magic system, and we want it to be believable and very rewarding for the audience to read as they share in the character’s cleverness. To do that, we believe that the audience should be able to figure out how the magic system works on their own without hearing scads of exposition by a secondary character explaining what the heck just happened—just like in anime. ^_^

Anyway. Enough pontification. Here’s a few images showing how the new undead and ghouls may look like in the dark. Spooky!

We are departing from our usual backstory concept art this week. Typically when we do environmental concept art we make it in full color so we can figure out the general mood for the environment, but in the case of Preston’s cabin we wanted to make sure that we develop something iconic. When designing the main character’s home we decided that the structure of the building should be figured out before the color, lighting, and the surrounding environment.

Ah. Another peaceful day in Hackberry Hollow where the critters will happily greet anyone that passes by—well, the undead critters anyway. Yes sirree. Say howdy to this squirrel and he’ll howdy back.

Of course, this is how Hackberry Hollow looked before it hit the fan.

What we have here is a scene from the forest surrounding Hackberry Hollow. Seeing ghosts in the forest and in town was an everyday event when Hackberry Hollow was still in its prime twenty years before the story starts. It was not uncommon for one to be used as a guide directing authorized visitors to secret locations, misdirecting or attacking those who aren’t, or to fulfill any number of tasks for the necromancers that created them.