Rainforest Shaman - Dreamblade

You may be aware that I worked on a little miniatures game called Dreamblade some time back. This blog is littered with turnarounds and work that I generated starting now over six years ago. Though it seems hard to believe at this point I still have more to share with you from that time in my career!

Today I have for you one of the first minis I designed for Dreamblade, the Rainforest Shaman. A sad little orangutan that I could have done so much more with... but I didn't know any better at the time and seems to have been good enough after all, it did get turned into a mini. This is what the final Rainforest Shaman turnaround looked like...

Rainforest Shaman
© 2005 Wizards of the Coast LLC

Little monkey man on a rock doing something with his hand. First things first, the art description did call for him to have a lot less hair so that you could see his sweet tats... and originally he was suppose to have some sort of lightning or energy element to go along with his game ability to energize. The Shaman went through some different stages as we worked out the details and finer points of his gear and pose...

Rainforest Shaman - evolution
© 2005 Wizards of the Coast LLC

As I am want to do, I did have some extra time recently and I thought it would be fun to take a fresh crack at the Rainforest Shaman to see how I would go about it today, some six years later. I seem to be doing a lot of this lately, but I find it really enjoyable and I think it has been letting me evaluate how I use to go about solving design issues compared to how I currently solve them. Hopefully this will let me move forward with a better understanding of how I create. All that aside, here is the 2011 version of the Rainforest Shaman...

Rainforest Shaman Redux
© 2011 Christopher Burdett

First thing I did when starting on this new version was to get a ton of orangutan image reference. I know for a fact I looked up a bunch of reference six years ago, but to compare the images of orangutan I have today versus my original design I would think I had not used any reference at all. For one thing orangutan feet are AMAZING! Well, orangutan in general are pretty amazing in and of themselves, which is why I wish I had done more with the original. I think I came up with a much better solution for his hand gesture and over all it feel more like an orangutan and less like Dr. Zaius. Anyway... I think it is at least a better drawing and that in addition to having fun while drawing was the goal!

That is all for another Wednesday on the blog, see you back here on Friday! Until then...

For more samples of my work or to contact me regarding my availability head over to my website: www.christopherburdett.com