Gilkey Warlocks RPG – Pius Westcombe

This year is the ten year anniversary of the short story I did for Gotham Academy issue 17 titled 'Whatever Became of the Gilkey Warlocks". It was a tale about four friends at the boarding school who find a hidden room to play the RPG Serpents & Spells in 1984 during whatever the Bat-verse's version of the satanic-panic was. (past blogpost about the tale here: http://davidpetersen.blogspot.com/2016/04/gotham-academy-short.html)

As a fun exercise I decided to do character portraits of each of the Warlock's RPG personas since they were never seen in the story. For this post I'll be breaking down the art process for Davey Kurtz's Serpents & Spells character: Pius Westcombe.

The Gilkey Warlocks are based on my friends and I back when we were younger and more active as RPG-ers. Davey Kurtz is the Gotham version of my friend Mike Davis. His character Pius Westcome (a name arrived at using a school he attended and his street name) is described as 'tiny gnomish illusionist' and it's his incantation of the spell 'animated shadows' that causes the trouble for the friends when unknowingly under the effects of Jonathan Crane's fear toxin.

I started with a pencil sketch on copy paper that I scanned in to Photoshop to add some color blocking as well as pasting in a few stock shapes to become his staff and poof of magic.

Like the original Gilkey Warlocks pages, I decided to do these in pencil. Though I did opt not to do as much rendering and tone to keep it less messy and quick since it's just a fun exercise. A printout of the color-blocked sketch was taped to the back of a sheet of Strathmore 300 series bristol and on my Huion lightpad I was able to do a clean drawing using a mechanical pencil with HB lead.

The shading and texture was added to certain areas like his striped pants, boots, and quilted harlequin cap. The poof of magic got the most value range of rendered pencil to try and make it something more etherial and not just a 2D shape.

With the drawing finished I scanned it into Photoshop to start the painting process. The first step of that is called 'flatting' where flat colors are laid in to establish all the color areas. On a more technical level, the pencils were on a layer set to multiply (which treats white as transparent, black as opaque and any % in between as that % of transparency) The colors were all put on a layer underneath that one.

Pius's colors were inspired by the purple and gold school colors of Whittier Middle School where Mike and I first met. They also seemed to be a good wizardy palette.

For the final colors, I tinted the pencil art to be a warmer sepia (except the magic poof which I color balanced to be purple) and did some painting as well as some dodge and burn tool work (Photoshop's holdover tools from being a photography retouching program that allow over and under exposing areas with a brush). 

To get the magic to be more flashy I added a few painted layers on top of everything set to various layer modes to get that glow effect.

That's one Gilkey Warlock RPG character down––I'll share another in about a month's time...