BTS Character Building: Tundric Mudcloak
Kingdoms, Cryptocurrency, Courtiers — Mortegard is a blockchain-based world-building game for wizards and investors alike.
Keep scrolling for an inside peek at the character-building process for the creatures that crawl the Mortegardian landscape. First up, a noble dwarven swashbuckler named Tundric.
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Crafting one of Mortegard’s renowned courtiers is an involved and detailed process: Each character starts as a sketch or a loose collection of ideas presented by a team member, and is gradually developed into a fully-fledged digital painting and NFT card.
Mortegard focuses heavily on the lore and character of the world and we do our best to ensure everything is intriguing, consistent, and hints at the larger untold story — courtiers are no exception.
Below is an example of an early development sketch for Tundric, a dwarf known for his honor, bravery, and relentless opposition of the Tsar.
Tundric’s concept started out pretty loose, built off the basic idea of combining ‘pirate’ aesthetics with a traditional dwarven archetype.
The pirate influence showed itself in various ways: the weaponry and apparel are lighter-weight and more mobility-focused than typical dwarven armaments, sashes and scarves wrap hidden knives and crossbow bolts, and a fluid, casual stance seeks to imply dexterity, charisma, and guile.
Often the sketches are done with traditional media such as pencil, pen, and inkbrush; occasionally the process begins directly in Photoshop, as in this case. A light blue guideline helps differentiate the structural lines, and does not appear in the final product.
At this stage, don’t worry about detailing or refining anything — capturing the attitude and personality of the character is paramount during the sketching process.
Pose, composition, and movement should be defined early, as even the most beautiful detailing will fall flat without a strong, clear, visual presence.
Once the sketching process has captured the essence of the character, it’s time to continue developing the artwork. It is important not to get too caught up in refining the sketch — often, detailing that works well in linework needs to be adjusted later in the process, eg. Tundric’s bracer.
(PS — it really is a collaborative process, if you want to have a hand in shaping the essence of characters like Tundric, just join us on Discord!)
As the coloring process starts, the depth and texture of the character begin to shine through.
This character was painted primarily using these Photoshop mixer brushes, designed to simulate the behavior of oil paint in various states of dryness. Typically we start with a larger brush, which helps lay the color down smoothly and ensures we don’t get caught up in detailing right away.
The base colors of each section are blocked-in first, and then detail, lighting, and surface imperfections are built up in increasingly lighter colors, typically with the most vibrant as the top layer. This part of the process is extremely flexible — although the mixer brush workflow encourages dark-to-light buildup, interesting effects can be achieved by ignoring this as well.
Ideally, the level of detail will increase gradually across the entire piece — Tundric doesn’t follow this rule very well, as you can see his face is largely complete before the boots have even been blocked in.
This highlights the flaw in this approach — in the next image you’ll see that we’ve had to adjust Tundric’s face after the detail in the rest of the piece catches up.
By completing the detailing gradually and in stages, you’ll have a better idea of how each section works in the larger framework of the character.
The face turned out to be lacking the gravitas we wanted for this character. (If that happens to you too, don’t panic!)
After sketching a handful of facial hair styles, we settled on a classic beard — is there a better choice for a dwarf, really? Before getting into final detail and polish, there are some gaps to fill in, edges to clean up, and some other areas that need minor adjustment.
The art of Mortegard veers heavily toward the fantastic, but we don’t want it to turn out like a cartoon.
Even an extremely skilled artist can’t paint everything from their mind’s eye every time — there’s nothing wrong with using reference images, as long as they are indeed a reference.
Tundric’s face, for example, is loosely modeled after a famous American actor. Can you guess who?
Realistic lighting is another way to ground the characters in the world, and although the courtier is still unfinished, you’ll see that the light source and shadow remain consistent throughout the process.
The key to this is picking a light source early — for Tundric, the light is coming from the right-front quadrant of the composition, illuminating his left side and casting shadow on the right.
After some blending, clean-up, and polish, we’re starting to approach the final product.
You can see here that we’ve begun to explore some color alteration options: adjusting the shoulder piece to a more vibrant color brings a whole new character to the piece.
The majority of the courtiers are released in a handful of versions, which gives us the option of multiple color schemes, decorations, and other details; the purple of the shoulder plate brings a regal air to our swashbuckler, and we ended up expanding this theme for his rarest and most powerful version.
After completing the ‘main’ version of each courtier, we dive back in to develop unique, alternate versions.
This, for example, is the rarest version of Tundric — although he shares the same base as the original courtier, a simple color change can make a big difference in the character’s perceived personality.
One of the main advantages to working in Photoshop is the flexibility it offers throughout the process.
Altering color while retaining value, tone, and detail allows a great deal of freedom when it comes to nailing down the final costume design, even at the very end of the painting workflow.
Thanks for tuning in, and keep an eye out for more tutorials and Behind-the-Scenes content!
If you’ve got any ideas how to help bring our characters to life, (or you want to make a guess about Tundric’s reference) join us on Discord or Twitter and help the Rulers shape the fate of Mortegard (both in-game and out)!
