Inspiration for Art
One of our main inspiration for our artstyle in the Kalevala game was from the movie Mumintrollet och kometjakten directed by Maria Lindberg.
Mumintrollet and Kometjakten is a Finnish puppet movie and therefore our main aspiration was to design our characters and environments like they would have been made of fabric and we want our characters to look like they are still animated puppets when playing our game.
As character designer I started my designprogress on one of our main characters Väinämöinen by researching different fabrics and textures. I found several very interesting ideas of different materials that could be used by looking at pictures online and started to sketch on a new upgraded version of the old model of Väinämöinen.
But the result from my sketches did not fulfill my vision on how I wanted our visual style to look so I continued to research until I found a bunch of different photos of various handmade puppets that seemed to been made with what looked like mostly yarn material in different forms. I collected all of my found and approved photos in a moodboard and started to look for various free brushes that could be used for making a yarnlike material in photoshop.
Here is the progress on Väinämöinen this far.
