TRDL 2011 Series, No. 86 – Ekleipsis [TRDL Original Character]

This was done for the TRDL R3 Jam this week, the subject being a redesign challenge: Heroifying a Villain.

For this challenge, I chose to redesign one of my own designs that isn’t very old at all. I fired up the new DCU Online game, once it went free to play, and built a character on my PS3, just to test out the customization engine. Once I took the character into the game, I played for awhile but with family and other obligations, didn’t have much time for more than that. But the villain I created for that exercise I named Calamity Cate, kind of a bruiser.

Blurry pic here, but you can see that she has a fitted bodice, dark pants, boots, arm warmer type sleeves, gloves, a fitted eye mask, dark shoulder length hair, and a split cape. The colorway was red abc black for Calamity Cate. I liked the design well enough.

For this redesign, I took many of the costume form cues, and tightened them up for the new look. This is Ekleipsis, the National Hero of Greece in the TRDL Original Universe. You can read about some of the design notes in my process pics below.

Artists, come join us on R3 and submit to the jams! The R3 Illustration Jam offers new characters weekly, but all jams remain open so you can contribute to any that you like, here:
http://www.thirdraildesignlab.com/forum … m.php?f=27
or in the TRDL-R3-WeeklyJam group on DA, here:
http://trdl-r3-weeklyjam.deviantart.com/

:::

You can find a larger version here.

You can see this illustration herein the TRDL Tribute Gallery.

:::

Background:

Again, here is the original design of Calamity Cate, the villain. Blurry, yes. But anyway, this is where we begin.

I hope you can see how this design follows from the original Calamity Cate. I took a few approaches to the concept of ‘heroifying’ a villain character, beyond just making a hero in general. Certainly if this was a mainstream, known character (let alone one that has already jumped to the ‘good side’ from their original dark roots) it would be about softening or brightening the look of the character as a villain, to make them more visually recognizable as a hero and palatable to the citizens they interact with. In my case, since I was redesigning my own design, I knew I could go any way I wanted, but I focused on two design aspects: color and symbols.
I moved the colorway of the design from the black and red (danger colors) to a milder, softer grey, and later pale indigo, and white. I also employed the use of symbols in the costume, as iconography is something the public can recognize and identify with. Certainly the same can be said of negative symbolism (very strong examples in our own history, obviously) but in keeping with the idea of the National Hero program in the TRDL Universe, I wanted the look to be something the people would gravitate to, see as something somewhat reminiscent of national symbolism, though without, in this case, using any contemporary Greek symbolism, as the Greece of the TRDL Universe does not share the same government.

Here’s the inks, ready to go. I immediately noted that her right arm ended up too long, evidence of my exhaustion and precarious drawing position. Easier to fix digitally so i kept going.

Here. I’ve processed the inks for render and fixed the arm by shortening it, stitching the rotator cuff back together, and redrawing the hand gripping the cape.

I chose a darker olive complexion for her skin, keeping the greek origin in mind and definitely skewing darker complexion within the selection set of this culture.

I was pretty sure I wanted to skew into the blues but I didn’t yet know what hue, so I started with warm grays to establish the tone I wanted.

Here’s shading on the grays. Note that the shading on the white areas would be of a different color.

For the white, sometimes I use another color as the shade on white, which can give the design some cohesiveness with other colors, such as pale blue or pink or green. In this case I went with a lighter blue.

This led me to find the color I wanted, which is sort of a pale indigo, which looks sharp against the silver of the cape pin, and also plays up the moonlight thing. A note about that imagery, also: it was quite a challenge to stay away from Moon Knight as much as possible. I even did a female redesign of Moon Knight several years ago as a commission, so it was hard to wrap my head around the moon symbolism with a regional flavor but staying away from the well known costume details.

So that’s my redesign, turning the TRDL Original Universe villain Calamity Cate into the National Hero of Greece, Ekleipsis. Since the character was really designed just to toy around with the DCU Online engine, I never wrote an origin or formalized it in the TRDL Universe. But just for fun, I’ll wrote in the villain-to-hero conversion into Ekleipsis’ origin for the sourcebooks. For science!

Thanks for reading.

Follow this topic in the R3 Forum here!

Related posts:

1. TRDL 2011 Series No. 85 – Enchantress
2. TRDL 2011 Series No. 75 – Alpha [Commission]
3. TRDL 2011 Series No. 20 – Haywire