Phase 3 Concept Art

Since we’re getting started on Phase 3, I figured it was worthwhile to get a thread together with some of the art I’ve been putting together behind the scenes.

Posts

  1. Megaverse Medley
  2. Menagerie at Midnight Duo
  3. The Grasscutters
  4. The Seven Wonders (2/7)
  5. Safe Harbor Launch System
  6. Continuum Swords
  7. Phase Three Medley

Characters

  1. The Blockheads [One]
  2. Bodark [One]
  3. Concordance Agents [One]
  4. La Cordera [One]
  5. Doctor Zap [One]
  6. Dralis Acolytes [One]
  7. Enora Dralis [One | Two]
  8. Glom [One]
  9. Grasscutter One [One]
  10. Grasscutter Mercenary [One]
  11. The Hand [One]
  12. Jenny Byrne [One]
  13. Khyrrsz [One]
  14. Somber [One]
  15. Stellar Six Logo [One]
  16. Vermillion [One]
  17. Quinnar Gentry [One]
1 Like

So we just met Somber in Every Star a Battlefield. Last September, Bill came to me with just the name and I think I had thrown this together within like half an hour. I don’t know why, but something about the name just struck me.

That said, Somber has ended up being a bit different from what I originally envisioned, so this design might drift a bit as we learn more about them.


The Blockheads named at the end of that story are from a very old piece of Concord art from when I first started making Sentinels card art. I needed some mooks and these robot dudes were the first thing I came up with. We’ll see how much Bill fleshes them out (if at all), but just in case I also make this design for leader-type Blockhead.

And finally, since we’re on space stuff anyway, recently Bill corrected me on my misconception that Enora Dralis mentioned in Phase 2 was just a pseudonym of Sablestar and is instead her own character. With that new information, I figured that I’d take a swing at designing what the Void Shadow’s trainer of the next generation would look like.


The only detail I had to go on was that she was dressed in black and Jordan quickly clocked her as a Light Hope-style character, so I referenced that character’s silhouette from the recent Netflix cartoon. No idea if she’ll show up in Phase 3, but I’m willing to give it a solid maybe with Concord and Friends heading out into space.

1 Like

Also in Phase 3, we’ve met two new characters: Bodark and Vermillion.


Bill had fairly developed looks for these characters before I ever got involved, so all I can take credit for is executing Bill’s vision in a visually appealing way. That said, I think this works well, especially for the Urban Fantasy bent that Menagerie at Midnight is taking. Much more Hellblazer than Justice League.

1 Like

Well we’ve finally gotten a name for the mercenaries Charade and crew have been dealing with in All Heroes Must Die: The Grasscutters.

I’ve had a big of time to noodle out some ideas for the Grasscutters and have done a bit of sketching trying to figure out what a generic Grasscutter field operative would look like, and this is what I came up with.

I’ve also had some thoughts about either a leader for the Grasscutters or a lead field operative, tenatively named Grasscutter One: an original character whose design is not at all based upon any other character I’ve ever drawn before.


I mean, I guess you could draw some parallels. :smirk:

2 Likes

Now that we’ve met a couple of the Seven Wonders, time to share some designs.

So to peel back things a little, Bill came to me a couple months ago and told me a bit about the characters, so I had time to come up with a couple designs. Upon hearing the high level concepts (caveman god and gooey Spider-man) I came up with these designs.


These weren’t what Bill was looking for (Khyrrsz, close but needed a bit more gravitas. Glom, nowhere close, needed to much more street level and no tech.) so I went back to the designs.

After a couple more revisions, I came up with these:


Khyrrsz still needs a bit of a clean up pass, but I’m fairly happy with Glom. And then we need to take a pass at the Hand (after I ignore all of the lady stage magician superhero designs my peers in the Sentinels card community have come up with over the years. [No, I don’t know why there are… 6 super stage magicians either. Two even have the same name*.])

For completion’s sake, the existing SotM decks with the theme of “stage magician” are:

  • Hyperbole
  • Magnificent Mara
  • Mr. Magic
  • Pokerface (a villain deck!)
  • Pokerface (a different villain deck?!)
  • Tsukiko the Magnificent
1 Like

A first pass at depicting the Launch System, appearing in the Newmenagerie stories. The Hula Hoop at the center can be rotated to face any of the hangars before firing up, and the outer ring can rotate as well when the Hula Hoop is in operation.

The materials here are stock “realtime materials” that come with a Blender add-on. For comic use, I’d work on a comic shader and really pay attention to my lighting.

1 Like

Oh hey, this thread exists!

Since Continuum Swords have come up in Pursuit Through the Pleiades, I figured I would talk through some of my ideas I’ve had on the topic.


First we’ve got Sablestar/Ambra Nerach’s sword. An elegant weapon that can slip through her enemies’ defenses. Sword style-wise, I see her with a one-handed style almost like epee/rapier fighting. Bait her enemies into making the first move and then punish their openings. Add to that her mastery of the sword’s abilities, it makes for a deadly weapon for a deadly foe.


Next is Peri’s sword. While not terribly functionally different from Ambra’s, I designed it to have a bit more personality to it with the star bursts trailing from the pommel like a Kingdom Hearts Keyblade’s keychain. Style-wise, I would put her as “functional.” Based on the Phase Two/Phase Three stories, Jordan’s let her shard do the driving on the sword fighting and has emulated that after she was cut off, so while she has some surprises she’s not doing anything fancy.


Finally we have Adam’s sword (formerly Sablestar of the Future’s). He doesn’t have a Shard to handle how to manage/power the sword, so his is dangerous. He’s not giving it the right amount of power, he’s not giving it the right kind of power, this things sparks and is probably a hazard to anyone around Concord. On top of that, Concord likely wields this thing like an anime protagonist: no skill, just force. While that means that he can overwhelm lesser foes, it makes him predictable to someone with actual skill. Even Will with his superheavy Excalibur probably shakes his head at this boy whenever he draw this sword.

3 Likes

One of the superheroes in my mental roster is a former villain who was possessed by a cursed sword, and spent the next few years being its puppet. But when the curse was broken, she discovered she still had the muscle memory for expert swordplay, and as long as she wasn’t consciously trying to use it, she was amazing with any sword she picked up.

There might be a training montage we haven’t seen, where William teaches Adam and Jordan swordplay while on the Love Bug. Take a shot at it if you feel up to it, visually or otherwise :smiley:

1 Like

Time to play a little bit of catch up.

With the wrap up of Pursuit Through the Pleiades, we’ve gotten a lot of world building with the cosmic side of the Menagerie-verse. While Bill already posted this on that thread, he gave me a bit of an early description of everyone’s favorite new character: The Most Illustrious Supernova of the Universe, the Legendary Navigator of the Space-ways, the Right Honorable Quinnar Gentry.


Wanted to make sure he wasn’t quite a re-costumed Concord, so did a bit of playing around with the eyes, in particular the extra ones on the right side of their face. Tried to evoke wings and feathers with the shapes, which I think fits their pirate aesthetic.

Speaking of Concordance characters, I figured we were going to see a lot of them in this story so I decided to do some looks for some generic Concordance agents and other empowered characters (your background characters).

The Acolytes would be those trained under the tutelage of Enora Dralis. And speaking of her, I did some refinement on her design. Leaning into “weird reptilian space nun” with this one.

And finally on the Megaverse front, Super Chica has really gone down a new path with her name change to La Cordera and I feel like that deserves a costume refresh.


Obligatory “it has pockets!.” Wanted to give her something that still says “I’m ready to fight” without it being the default state, hence the poncho. I also just think it would be cool for her to start off a fight by pulling it off, either the slow removal as she stares down her opponent or the quick whip off as things start too quickly to lean on ceremony. I think it would look very cool in a animated setting.

Moving on from the Megaverse, City of Clones just wrapped up and it really got me invested with the ANTIBODY Program as a villainous organization. And so I attempted to tackle the face of that organization: Jenny Byrne.


I think Bill said it best when I showed him this design and his response was "To vet any Jenny sketch, just show it to Dave and say ‘is this Jason’s type?’” so we’ll see what @Dave has to say about it.

Next we move onto next month’s story, The Arcane Assassin. Don’t know much about the eponymous assassin yet, so we’ll instead focus on the Marvelous Menagerie’s other foe, the Seven Wonders. If there’s one member of the Wonders who gave me a headache, it’s the Hand. Not for any of the reasons you would imagine, but because there is already an unbelievable amount of stage magician characters in the Sentinels custom community and I didn’t want her design to overlap with theirs. (Seriously, I could have pulled up another four or five examples.)


I do like what I’ve come up with here but I think I’m going to want to take another refinement pass on her before calling it finished. Also going to need to tackle some of the other Wonders (3/7 so far) to make sure the group as a whole looks good together if not cohesive. They should not look like a well branded team, that’s for the Stellar Six.

And while I haven’t done that much designing with the Stellar Six, I did start with the most important part: a logo.


This team is so corporately branded (like the Serval Industries era of X-Factor) that having a logo in place was almost a requirement to build the rest of the team’s look around that central theme. Also got to be able to imagine it on an entire row of boxes in a toy store. These guys should feel like a live action Paw Patrol. :laughing:

Finally, a step back to the Phase Two stories. Don’t remember if I showed this off to anyone other than Bill, but I really liked Doctor Zap from the Atlantis stories and took a crack at the old science squid.


Wanted to channeled a bit of Don Bluth energy here. Got to give Zap a bit of appeal without going full anthropomorphic and I think the pseudo-eyebrows work with that.

Thoughts?

2 Likes

I gave my feedback on all of these of course, and it all looks great :slight_smile: But to give what I always ask from other people, here’s some specifics.

Quinn and his band of Dark Drifters are the “surprisingly nice guys” of the Megaverse villain roster. The “dark” in their names sounds like it might be talking about evil at first, but it’s about outer space - “the great dark”. I gave Mike a specific outfit to start from, but the pose, colors, and everything else was all him. It nails the sort of cheerful “outsized Bollywood braggart” vibe I wanted for this guy.

Enora Dralis as a character was introduced when Jordan first got her Void Shadow shard, “Anty”. In Green Lantern terms, if Sablestar was their Hal Jordan, Enora is their Kilowog. The design, however, is all Mike’s, and he put a lot of thought into the character’s nature and behavior.

The extended Menagerie roster has a bunch of tough female brick characters and I’ve been trying to give them all unique stories. Mike picked up on what I was doing with Keri and gave her a fantastic outfit that matches her aspirations.

I brought Jenny out of the archives to mess with Jason during Phase 2 and had enough fun with her to keep her around as a more visible antagonist in Phase 3. This picture really delivers on what I pictured for her, though as I said and Mike repeated, we don’t yet know from Dave if she’s Jason’s type or not :grin:

All I can say is “sorry for yet another stage magician”, but I think you did a great job making something that stands out.

Zap is also one of my favorite characters. He’s supposed to be one of the sympathetic Atlanteans - a highly placed, well meaning scientist who is fascinated by this other world he’s been put in contact with, and has enough pull to actually be helpful instead of just being eccentric color in a scene. So this picture nailed all of that.

1 Like

OH, yeah.

Um. I mean. Yeah, sure, if you like that sort of thing.

5d3f5f5e4e5437c8769ba2932c1d8cc2e7faafed1

1 Like

1 Like

To be fair, the question was, “Is she Jason’s type?” (which Jenny was literally designed to be) vs “Is she Jason’s pathology?” Which would definitely nab Alycia the top spot. :grimacing:

2 Likes