[Riot Creative Contest 2017] - Winter Hot Spring Wukong

fleetingthunder

Hi everyone! I'm planning to do a winter/hot spring themed skin of my main champion Wukong! 

Here is a bunch of references that I have gathered so far for my piece, they mostly have Tibetan cultural influences which I feel should be a good fit for this:

fleetingthunder

Current WIP designing this armor, I really liked the ox head from my reference so I mashed it into the shoulder armor. I went for a travelling monk/hunter esque vibe



Threw in a few designs on the head, people from my discord chat quite like 1 and 2, I like the hair of 4 because it gives it that vibe of age and wisdom so I might try to impose that on the other 2 maybe

fleetingthunder

Current WIP of the design so far, will adjust the shoulder later on 



Ran a few color palettes I quite like the blue face in 2, clothing wise I might go either 3 5 or 6, let me know what you guys think!

fleetingthunder

Current WIP so far, forgot to update on some of the milestones  :*   I decided to go with wukong jumping down into a hot spring and unfortunately there is a poor monkey running away from his imminent demise - "Even though Wukong has become a master at his own right, his childish side will never waver for a thousand years"



Here I roughly fleshed out my idea, trying to get most of the detail of wukong



From there I started to flesh out the environment, not my strongest point, I grabbed a few references for some interesting shapes. I'm aiming for a temple located in the heart of some snowy mountains that have natural hot springs flowing out.



Messed around with some colors, not too sure about the background tone will play around with it more later on, focusing on the main subject, I'm quite happy with the palette on wukong, will most likely push out the saturation later on.

Katya_Cyan

Your idea and composition looks very cool) 

Velurie

This is awesome! Such a powerful pose and composition!

Ingoro

Keeping an eye on this. Good luck the last few days.

fleetingthunder

Forgot to update my thread, I'm so lazy when it comes to posting stuff, if I had a robot or something to do it for me that would be great 

Here was the first stop for my piece, went about to gather critique on how to improve it

fleetingthunder

....And then here is the final version!

Some of the changes I made were:
- making distinctions of the material, especially the armor. 
-adding motion blur as that is usually a Riot key element
-adding more monkeys, especially further in the background to promote the depth and scale of the building
-touching up the foreground elements such as the mist and adding more snowballs and also making the water less 'dense' looking
-adding bounce light from the water to add more variation



There still some things I would have liked to try out a couple more things but alas I had no time such as:

-improving my edges especially for my background elements, I went lasso tool and fill crazy so I felt I cut around too many corners
-still could improve the rendering of the water

That's all I could think of for now but I really enjoyed creating this piece, if anyone has any comments/critique to offer please do so! I look forward to the winning selections!