Skullduggers Concept Art Revamp

Beware the Skullduggers, a group of diminutive animated bones who use the scrap gear and weapons of fallen fighters as they tunnel and mine to excavate more of an equipment horde as well as bones of the dead to stock their own ranks with. 

They can range from a lone goblin-sized miner to a swarm of calamity miscreants all the way up to a legion of undead ready to murder the heroes and townspeople and collect all their possessions to repurpose for their own use.

Well––at least that's the idea of what they are. In fact, they are a re-design of an old drawing I 'unearthed' when scanning pencil drawings for my Patreon.

Back in the earliest of the 2000's, I was toying with the idea of creating a table-top game (like Warhammer) with simpler rules for movement, army creation, etc.

While struggling to design those elegant game mechanics (which never materialized) I only ever drew a few of the types of creatures one could populate their fighting forces with.

To the right is that old drawing of a single Skulldugger (I envisioned these were the minion pawns that could respawn.

As a just-for-fun exercise, I thought it would be fun to redraw and redesign and older concept piece of mine like this (Plotmasters style). I hope to do this with a few of the other drawings I've found when scanning things for Patreon.

I penciled the mining Skulldugger first, but then decided that the concept art should reflect the idea that these are a throng of minions rather than one unique character.

So, on other sheets of copy paper I drew one with a lantern (inspired from a character in Hellboy: Wake the Devil) and a glimpse of one in armor. These were scanned and assembled and then given a quick color splash to help me see the forms easier.

I printed out the above layout and taped it to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol. Using my Huion lightpad I was able to see through the surface of the bristol to the printout below and use it as a guide to ink from. I used Copic Multiliner SP pens.

It was important to to overwhelm the inks with too much texture, so I tried to limit it to their gear where I needed a material or rust to be obvious and also to help break up the space between the larger open areas in their designs.

There is a tanget I regret in the armored one's eye socket and the rust spot on the front one's pick axe---it looks like a continuation of the opening...but I knew I could improve upon it with color.

The first step after scanning in the inks for digital coloring is called color flatting/ It's basically a professional version of coloring inside the lines.

I'd roughly established a color scheme for the front Skulldugger when doing the pencils/layouts, and opted to keep that look and expand on it only a bit to fill in the other two characters. 

These little minions should be dusty, dirty, and corroded––so I liked going with a cohesive muted palette. At this stage I also established color holds (areas where I wanted the lineart to be a color other than black) on the lantern openings and the miner's candle flame.

Here again are the final colors. They were rendered using the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop and a stock textured brush. 

I have no immediate plans for what to do with these guys, but between my Draw The Extinct creatures, Discovering Dragons, and a few more like this––I seem to have a nice bestiary for fantasy gaming...