This was a series of character designs i did for an indie fantasy RPG called The Immortal. Some of them have more then one version. More artwork will be posted as the project goes on. Hope you like it!

For the spades royal family i tried to create a more belic, and menacing royal family. This one would have more of a cold palette, with blues and greens, and a more dramattical lighting, with lots of fabric and leather with simple clothes. This was very influenced by the northern/viking societies. I wanted them to look like barbarians with fierce looks. The one that would hunt you down.

Kudos for Robert Schultz for creating such an ambitious and enjoyable project to work on and giving so much room for me to create. I’ll update this post for when the digital game is done and can link up to the project’s site.

Hope you guys enjoy it! Feel free to comment and critic!

For this royal family i went with a radical different concept. I wanted to create a primitive, native royal family, so the portraits would be filled with green, browns and yellows. Wanted to give more primitive assets as skulls, bone made earrings, animal teeth, lots of colored feathers and animal fur. The skin tone too would be rather different, more tanned, with war paint and they would have that wisdom and calm look. Some kind of wisdom of the ancient forests.

For this set i tried to visualize a dark magic royal family. They would be those kind of family that lived for thousands of years, using black magic to survive the pass of time. That’s why i tried to imply that undead, horrifying and vicious look. They would use more darker tones, as black, and purple, red, as in their unspeakable magic spells.

For the characters in each suit i tried to create some cohesive patterns to them so the player could get an instant feel, and also read well from a distance.

First, i tried to lock some angle into each one. The queen would always be facing left, the jack would be facing right, and the king would have a imposing posture always a bit more centralized in the frame. Also tried to limit my collor pallete range to each suit, giving a background, some history and distinct differences to them.

The Hearts royal family, would be the rich, luxurious one. Always using gold, and warm colors, reds, yellows and such. The members would have some snob look and expression, kind of influenced by the old french/english court feel.

After working a little bit on the zelda fan art series, i was hired to do some realistic portraits for a card deck. It was an ambitious project, and a very interesting experience. I’ll post here the illustrated portraits and the back card illustrations.

Used a more colorfull palette for the jokers, and didn’t use any particular angle or expression to make them similar. In fact i wanted both of them to stand out as individual/unique cards, that’s why i also used a little bit of a opposite range of colors on each one, so the player in the game could get an instant feeling of what joker he got his hands into. The background for every portrait card is very suggestive as this cards must read properly on very large but also little thumbnails size, so the focus is in the character.

I went on reasearch and did quite a few sketches to find ou the right layout for the back illustration. In most decks they’re very graphical, full of details but also almost always, monochromatic. So when the cards are facing down, the player don’t get too confused with complex color range. I chose some royal/classic/fantastic motifs as dragons, leafs and lions to make an interesting coat-of-arms of sort. Did two versions, one monochromatic, and one with more lush and appealing collors.