As I did with the Tidal Soldier, I looked back at the mood-board for reference when concepting the Playwright.
I wanted a very imposing stature for the Playwright, to emphasise his pretentiousness and level of danger. I wanted him to dress very extravagant despite being secluded most of the time, showing his commitment to his craft and also a strange sort of lunacy. I made some initial silhouettes that conveyed what I wanted to see in his character, moving away from colour for the first stage of the Playwright’s concept as I wanted to focus on his silhouette initially the most.
I was most drawn to the aura that one of the silhouettes that I gave the Playwright, as it exuded the imposing, yet higher-class gaudiness/extravagance that I wanted to convey. I further developed this design, tweaking what aspects of it I liked, and doing a colour test to see how I can draw attention to certain parts with accent colours, in this case, I used gold as it exuded a pretentious demeanour. Though he is mostly humanoid, I wanted there to be something eerily off about him, as not only was he acting on behalf of the Eclipse region, he is overseeing the Ecliptic Blight and also slowly being consumed by it himself, thus, I went a more ghost/spectre like direction by omitting his legs, suggesting that he floats around using power rather than walking around. I experimented with the appearance of the mask, giving it three faces all with closed eyes, to symbolise the ignorance and dismissiveness of his character. Though I did add some moon motifs in the design, such as on the lapels of his jacket or subtly on his forehead, I thought that for the pretentiousness of his character, I should experiment with making the symbol of the Eclipse bigger. I also looked to many images for inspiration regarding the details of his outfit as I wanted there to be many extravagant elements to it such as ruffles and puffed or larger sleeves, along with a very exaggerated hat like the ‘Red Death’ costume for the Phantom within the stage production of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, and the elaborate hats seen in many Venetian Carnival outfits.
After developing this design, I was satisfied with the overall concept, and liked the direction that it was going- however I wanted to add more ocean-like motifs within the character, along with making the symbol of the eclipse more obvious on his design. I used the above references to develop some layers of his outfit, and then rendered it in black and white, before tweaking some elements to improve the aspects that I believed were lacking.
I developed many of his designs based off of certain sea-creatures such as octopi, squid, jellyfish and sea dragons, as well as experimenting with the ratio of aspects and elements of the design such as the size of the symbol of the Eclipse and the shape of his layers and outfit. I felt that exploring the design in this way was very useful in gauging what I liked and disliked in the design, what I wanted to keep and otherwise.