Hackberry Hollow

When people ask us what the log line for Hackberry Hollow is we respond with “it is a story about a taxidermist in a world where all of the people are animals” and of course creating undead which is where the necromancy comes in (evil grin). So here we have it: the first ever character design to be put up on the blog if you don’t count the robots.

This week’s post and future posts will be released on Fridays instead of Tuesdays. There are a few reasons for this. First and foremost is that we are going to start showing the works-in-progress for our character designs.

I started doing a rotation of the new robot design so I can figure out what it looks like from all angles. Getting a design for one angle of a character is just a small part of the battle. You have to design it from all sides.

Here’s part 2 of what was posted last week regarding using Alchemy to aid in character design. I wonder what will happen when we take the new shapes and apply it to our original concept and rendering style?

After the jump we’ve got some information on the process of how we take the random shapes and use that to create an actual design.

Recently I’ve been researching and experimenting with a bunch of different techniques to help me design the characters of Hackberry Hollow. This week I’ve tried a couple of new things. The first one was sculpting characters to help me understand the 3D form to help me draw them, and the other is using a program called Alchemy which I used to create the above images.

I decided to go ahead and take over the post for this week, mainly so that Glen can have the time he needs to be able to get character design done without going into temporary insanity over the endless tasks that pile up in his to-do lists.

One of the time consuming parts of creating art is figuring out exactly what colors to use. That’s one of the reasons why color keys are important to us. Not only does it help us create a color script for the comic, but once we get into production all we have to do is eye-drop our color keys and just paint away. We can skip the usual color study phase of our process once we get into production because we’ve already done it for all the art in that scene once before.

This is a quick painting of one of the island locals in Hackberry Hollow (Hackberry Hollow as in the name of the story, not the place in the story that lends its title). More info and concept sketches after the jump.

As Glen mentioned earlier, today is the 1 year anniversary of the start of the Hackberry Hollow blog. We’re pretty excited about this, and also about the upcoming release of the comic later this year. So to help us share some of that excitement we decided to give the plushie some party gear, and make all kinds of fun updates by spamming our blog with enthusiasm.

In addition to the social networking bandwagon that we have already jumped on we are now announcing that Lumaglyph has a twitter account. (For those of you who are wondering what Lumaglyph is, that’s the name of our studio.) Check it out and be sure to follow and tweet about us using the #hackberryhollow hashtag.

All of us here at Lumaglyph are very excited about reaching the Hackberry Hollow Blog one year mark. And I, with a stronger dose of my usual jittery excitement, was looking forward with great anticipation to today’s blog post. Then they told me they wanted me to write something for it…