Overview
Horses are only seen in Bloodborne when they're already dead - I wanted to explore a living horse, perhaps owned by a Hunter, that knew how to fight off enemies and could have survived in the hellish nightmare.
The Skillful Huntsman is a book by Scott Robertson and three of his top students, exploring designs for an obscure Grimm's fairytale. I used Khang Le, one of the students, as a base for this design process, as he used brush-pens for silhouettes, which I felt most confident with.
Research
- The Skillful Huntsman book.
- Horse images - specifically Clydesdales, Fjord horses, Shire horses, and Przewalski's horse (an ancient, stocky breed). I also looked up race horses to get a feel for the anatomy, but primarily I knew I wanted something stockier.
- Medieval horse armour and its placement.
- Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse (researched when I was looking up Yatagarasu).
- Dracopedia: The Bestiary - unicorn section - the artist designed a unicorn according to legends rather than typical fantasy rules.
Process
I knew I wanted unicorn imagery - something beautiful twisted into the macabre. Thus, all my sketches focused around something
Initial silhouettes. Looking for shape/feel. Ranges from a skinny, wasting horse, to a much stockier breed, to something of bison-like stature. Also looking at what 'horn' fits - one affixed to armour, or a blade or spear shaft lodged in the horse's skull.
More silhouettes, alongside research. This is more of a throwback to Feng Zhu's methods, though it was advocated in commentary by Khang Le and the other artists in the book. Testing if the main should be barbed wire or spikes instead of fur.
The final design was selected from the traditional sketches - I find they're much quicker to complete, as I work small, and the brush-pen is much easier to block in with than with a digital brush. Initially I was going to have the horse with an almost buzzcut mane and a short tail, but to give the allusion that it had been surviving alone without human contact, I swapped to a more rough, knotty mane instead.
The armour is battered and bloodstained - on the chestplate piece, there is skull imagery. The shoulder pieces have blades, to act like the spikes on chariot wheels and cut through enemies. Its back feet also have spikes, for added damage when it kicks. There are no spikes on the front feet as horses can catch their front legs with their back hooves when running.
All the armour is present, as there is no way for the horse to have gotten loose from it alone. The only thing broken is the reins, so that players could not question why the horse can't be used as transport. Additionally, broken, dangling reins gives the horse a whip-like weapon.
His posture is to imply dignity, but also threat. One hoof is raised like a dog that's seen its prey. His overall silhouette is stocky, to give a sense of power and strength, the latter being added to by the unicorn-like spike protruding from the headpiece.
Final image. Background features faint grass to hint at the horse's normally benign nature, and low-hanging clouds/fog. I tested my Intuos' pen tilt function to aid drawing the fur - it's extremely useful.
Reflection
- Small, brush-pen silhouettes allow for quick designs
- Visual library came into play for vague knowledge of applicable horse breeds
- Slight points of detail in the background make the whole image more interesting
- Research, and drawing with reference images on the page, is a very valid method of design
- Simple designs often work better than more complex ones (i.e. the barbed wire mane)
- Don't ignore points of challenge - the saddle and most of the armour was almost left out as it seemed difficult to figure out, and I thought it might detract from the overall shape. In the end it proved to solidify the themes of strength instead
- Silhouettes are solid starting points for designs
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