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Spanish Conquistador

After doing some fantasy based character design for other IP's I decided I wanted to do something that was more grounded in reality. I chose to do some sort of historical character, and after looking up the history of Spanish Conquistadors I found something I really wanted to work on.

See, with Conquistadors a lot of them were just poor spaniards who didn't have a full set of armour, but didn't really need it either. they had been fighting the native South Americans for decades and found that much of a 'full' set of armour was essentially useless, what with the highest technological weapon the natives had being clubs.

Metal armour was just too strong for the natives, and too heavy for the invaders. And so I conceived a character that had been fighting for many, many years to conquer these foreign lands, but had just grown tired of it. I didn't want him to have much armour, maybe just a breastplate, and for them to look confident, but perhaps also tired. I began by making these quick roughs:


Now after choosing a sketch, I began posing for photos (which I'm not showing here) to better check the anatomy was correct. The problem I had was the helmet, it was an odd shape, one I found quite hard to visualize from the angle I had chose. And so I made a quick 3D mock up so I could better understand it and translate it into this 2D image.


Now it was just a case of painting in greyscale.


What I had been told during a recent talk with an Art Director though, was that my characters needed to feel grounded. That they needed to look like there were part of an environment they belonged to. So instead of the plain painterly background I had up until now, I added a South American mountain range, as well as the added colour. Thus completing the image of my worn middle ages Conquistador.

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