[Riot Creative Contest 2017] Elegant Camille
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Heard about this contest from a buddy and figured I'd throw myself in to see where I'm at skillwise.
I don't play League of Legends, so I didn't know any of the champions when I first started. I just started browsing the alphabetical list of official Riot biographies on each champion 'til I stumbled on Camille.
I found her description to be real neat: a surgical precision operative. When I heard this description, my first thought was female assassin/spy/counter-terrorist intelligence; sort of female James Bond kind of thing. I was excited to read her lore materials (the comic and the short stories), but interestingly they did not match what I had in mind.
She's described as "elegant, smooth operative" with a sharp mind and despises sloppy technique. Key ideas are elegance, nobility, grace, paired with ruthless cunning and efficiency. However, the lore materials do not do those words justice. In the comic and and short stories, she's painted as more of a thug and hitman, rather than a smooth operative. She tortures and mutilates rather than persuades and manipulates. Brute force over finesse. Where's the elegance?
Dig deeper into her lore and you realize there's a much more fundamental theme to her character. In order to fulfill her destiny serving the interests of her clan and homeland, she's described as having to sacrifice much of her humanity: her lover, her brother, her body, etc... to the point where no one really knows how much, if any, humanity she has left in her.
The storyteller in me believes that there must be more to her than some career hitman. There must be a humanity in her to be captured. She was once a girl in love wasn't she? There must be another side to her begging to have light shined upon it. She'd be a really boring character otherwise.
The contest rubric says to "focus on the fantasy of the champion". So I took a more liberal approach to meeting that criteria. Do a painting of her shedding her bloodstained, mechanical skin and into something more... beautiful. She's a wealthy, half cyborg noble: surely one can imagine the kinds of resources and luxury she has to fulfill such a fantasy, no? Let's paint her getting ready to infiltrate a gala event posing as a beautiful, perhaps even seductive, noblewoman, with the intent to, what? Seduce? Convince? Harbor? Assassinate? To kidnap? Who knows what's going on beneath that effortless smile of hers.
"Even the coldest steel reflects light."
I will finish this entry on my twitch stream at
Feel free to tune in to watch me finish it.
As I come to finish it, I'll gather up the references, sketches, and do a comprehensive explanation of how this drawing came to be. Or you can watch the vods.
I don't play League of Legends, so I didn't know any of the champions when I first started. I just started browsing the alphabetical list of official Riot biographies on each champion 'til I stumbled on Camille.
I found her description to be real neat: a surgical precision operative. When I heard this description, my first thought was female assassin/spy/counter-terrorist intelligence; sort of female James Bond kind of thing. I was excited to read her lore materials (the comic and the short stories), but interestingly they did not match what I had in mind.
She's described as "elegant, smooth operative" with a sharp mind and despises sloppy technique. Key ideas are elegance, nobility, grace, paired with ruthless cunning and efficiency. However, the lore materials do not do those words justice. In the comic and and short stories, she's painted as more of a thug and hitman, rather than a smooth operative. She tortures and mutilates rather than persuades and manipulates. Brute force over finesse. Where's the elegance?
Dig deeper into her lore and you realize there's a much more fundamental theme to her character. In order to fulfill her destiny serving the interests of her clan and homeland, she's described as having to sacrifice much of her humanity: her lover, her brother, her body, etc... to the point where no one really knows how much, if any, humanity she has left in her.
The storyteller in me believes that there must be more to her than some career hitman. There must be a humanity in her to be captured. She was once a girl in love wasn't she? There must be another side to her begging to have light shined upon it. She'd be a really boring character otherwise.
The contest rubric says to "focus on the fantasy of the champion". So I took a more liberal approach to meeting that criteria. Do a painting of her shedding her bloodstained, mechanical skin and into something more... beautiful. She's a wealthy, half cyborg noble: surely one can imagine the kinds of resources and luxury she has to fulfill such a fantasy, no? Let's paint her getting ready to infiltrate a gala event posing as a beautiful, perhaps even seductive, noblewoman, with the intent to, what? Seduce? Convince? Harbor? Assassinate? To kidnap? Who knows what's going on beneath that effortless smile of hers.
"Even the coldest steel reflects light."
I will finish this entry on my twitch stream at
Feel free to tune in to watch me finish it.
As I come to finish it, I'll gather up the references, sketches, and do a comprehensive explanation of how this drawing came to be. Or you can watch the vods.
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character references
Flow sketch