Viilal - the life stealer

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The assassins from the spine of the world instil deep fear into the hearts of men throughout the lands of Bhumi. Not truly alive, they exist only to take the lives of those they have been hired to. Unwavering focus and unshakeable resolve leads them relentlessly towards their assigned targets. Only the sun god has the power to strike fear into the life stealers.

Viilal is a member of this ageless clan from the land of Shyatha and his target runs fearfully in front of him...

The appearance, movements, clothing, weaponry and expressions of Viilal were developed over sometime. Here is a breakdown of some of the stages:

Firstly our penciller Keith Burns builds the basic stature and movement style of the character through rough sketches known just as "roughs"

Then we develop some of his more advanced and unusual movements in roughs

After that, we produce more detailed pencil sketches of his face. Pencils are usually done intitially in blue, as it is easier to remove the lines later if they are in blue.

Then we produce pencils of his upper torso

And eventually his entire body

Then we move on to the inking stage, where our inker Ken Cheung paints black ink onto the pencilled drawings in order to add in shadow and light, bring out important aspects of definition that have been created by the penciller and in some cases, outline the strongest lines.

In this case we also experimented with adding in a little red colour to create an unusual effect

This last inked image of Viilal that we used for our Character Design Competition is both sinister and somehow amusing at the same time

Finally we scan the inked images into the computer and our colourist Johnny Tam paints the colours in using a WaCom touch screen. In our office we call him the Wizard.