Warcraft

I guess these would be considered "old" by now, since I did these at the beginning of summer, but these are some character design concepts for "Warcraft: Legends Vol. 5" from the story "Nightmares", which was pretty cool to work on. It was also the first time I'd ever worked with previously established characters. Blizzard had to sign off their approval on each design and a certain amount of reworking was in order. This wasn't as big an issue as it could have been, and the process was pretty painless.
I don't actually recall a lot of the actual working process, but trying to recollect the actual gruntwork is a lot like trying to remember what it was like filling out your taxes. I did the thumbnails in a small sketchbook via pencil, but 90% of the work was done entirely digitally with a Wacom Intuos3 tablet and Photoshop CS3. I really like the digital method because it feels so much more malleable. Edits and tweaks or whole revisions are much easier, I think, but the tradeoff is that it can take a hell of a lot longer to get things done. When working in Photoshop, I tend to work at a highly magnified level, and the broad strokes and comprehension of the full page that you get with working on actual paper is lost because I'm eyeball-deep in pixels blown up to 300%.
I also realized that I'm really, really weak with backgrounds. I feel much more at ease with characters than I do environments, and even though I felt I improved with the Warcraft comic, it wasn't saying a lot that I was actually addressing backgrounds with a vague level of sincerity. Between that and trying to force myself into creating more dynamic panels and camera angles than I usually do, I think the comic was a step in the right direction, but a lot more needs to be done for this sort of thing to really pop.