A Look Inside the Art of Frekrheim with Ksenia Kozhevnikova
Ksenia takes us through the process of creating one of these pieces, a scene depicting the Temple of Wodagr, which happens to be whale-shaped.
Ksenia Kozhevnikova is an amazing artist whose work features heavily in Fury of the Forsaken, the TTRPG adventure currently on Kickstarter. Along with many other tremendous pieces, she provided three bird's eye view cityscapes of the Viking lake town of Frekrheim where the bulk of the adventure takes place. Here, Ksenia takes us through the process of creating one of these pieces, a scene depicting the Temple of Wodagr, which happens to be whale-shaped.
In her words:
I had the pleasure of painting artwork for the upcoming Thrones & Bones adventure called Fury of the Forsaken. I don't get commissioned a lot of environments, but when I do, I want to learn as much as I can to develop a workflow I can use again and again. In this case I broke it down to the following stages: thumbnails, 3D mockup, sketch pass to design, and final render. The challenge was to show a Viking-inspired city that is built on water in wintertime. The central focus of the piece is the whale-shaped temple of three local gods. I hope you enjoy the process!
1. Initial thumbnail pass. I looked at the top down map for the adventure module and figured out some cool cam angles. I thought of mood, contrast, scale and main focus.
2. 3D mockup in Blender based on the top down map, so it is all size-accurate! I extruded off of the top down map and did procedural shading to give me the base for the wooden city buildings. I used Eevee engine to render with light and depth passes.
3. Sketch or design pass. I did the shape language for the temple first and then the rest of the city came easily and naturally. I added crowds and fishing props.
4. Final painting. I took time to render light and shadow and mute the areas outside of the focal point, reduce overall noise. Thank you for reading!