Gilkey Warlocks RPG – Lafayette Flintpiercer

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 Wally Adam's Serpents & Spells character: Lafayette Flintpiercer.

The Gilkey Warlocks are based on my friends and I back when we were younger and more active as RPG-ers. Wally Adams is the Gotham version of my friend Nick Kowalcyk. His character Lafayette Flintpiercer (a name from a street nearby to his childhood home and our hometown + a school he attended) is described as the 'formidable dwarven berzerker'. In the dialogue he's confident he can survive the encounter because of his runic warhammer.

I started with a Procreate drawing I did on my iPad a few years ago. originally I was going to draw them all this way, but I never got confident drawing digitally on a tablet like I do on paper.

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 iPad drawing was first refined on paper and then that was 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 pencil shading and texture was added to certain areas like his hair, hammer, belts and armor. 

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.

Lafayette's colors were picked to both be louder and more aggressive, but also to stand out against the color choices of the first two character portraits I did of this party.

For the final colors, I tinted the pencil art to be a warmer sepia 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 render the forms and add highlights and shadows. 

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