Dev Blog - Art of the Blessed Tome
Heroes,
Today, we speak with Joseph, one of our concept artists here in the Shark Tank, about his development of the illustrations for the Warrior Priest's Blessed Tome. Joseph was also interviewed in one of our Developer Streams and talked more about the creation of the Warrior Priest of Sigmar. You can watch it by clicking on the button below!
Hello! My name is Joseph, and I'm pretty new at Fatshark. I've been here for roughly three and a half months. I’m from the Netherlands, and I’ve previously worked on projects like Killzone and Horizon before coming here to work on Warhammer: Vermintide 2. I'm super excited to work on this project as back when I was younger and started drawing, I purchased Codexes from second-hand shops and tried to copy the art. One of my favorites was the Warhammer: 40,000 - 3rd edition rule book.
My own copies were just as battered as this one from studying the pages over and over… and over.
It escalated from there, and I ended up studying to work with Games, and I just fell in love with Concept Art. If you ask me to choose a favorite artist, it is impossible. So many have inspired me throughout the years.
It’s a process!
Creating the art for Warrior Priest's Blessed Tome was an evolving task. The assignment was to make pages for the Blessed Tome that stood out and meshed well with the gameplay. With the Blessed Tome being such an iconic feature of a Warrior Priest of Sigmar, I had to be extra attentive to the design. Indeed, It was a bit of a process; the original idea of the Warrior Priest was to give him three different skills to use with the Blessed Tome, so three separate pages. Due to the ongoing development in Game Design, I worked alongside the Gameplay team to make sure my concepts corresponded with their design and intent.
When creating art like this, the first step is to gather materials on what is already there and keep the requirements in mind, and then I start working on rough sketches based on that. In this case, I began by looking at many Games Workshop published materials for inspiration. I started with that as my base and just ran with it and made sketches. It is essential when using reference art to retrofit the material to work with the new idea, which I did for my concepts. Specifically, The Life of Sigmar by Matt Ralphs was used for the text on the pages.
I had to be very careful, as the pages in the Blessed tome were supposed to look old and well-read, and things can look too digital quickly. I had to be mindful and add imperfections, making things look like traditional illustrations in ancient tomes. Things cannot look too perfect because traditional art is faulty, too!
The art style is a mix of Games Workshop lore and Medieval bible manuscripts that I found during the research for this concept. Art from this time was created by hand by monks in monasteries, so, therefore, were very expensive. The final result wound up with super elaborate lettering and gilded pages to look valuable and lavish. It was fun to draw inspiration from such exquisite art while remaining true to Games Workshop and their setting for Warhammer Fantasy. In retrospect, perhaps I was a bit too conservative with it and should have gone heavier on adding color!
This concept also filled a purpose in the gameplay. The biggest concern was making sure the player could see when the Blessed Tome was fully charged and ready to be used from the art. Eventually, we decided on something similar to a loading bar, which worked quite well from that perspective and looks good!
In conclusion, the concept overall changed quite a bit internally, as you have read, and because it was crucial to be in line with the gameplay team, it means that the art changed. Hence, you need to be sure your art translates well to what is happening in the game and that the art remains quite readable to the player.
Thank you for taking the time to read through the creation of the Blessed Tome art. I loved working with it!
/Joseph, Concept Artist.