The AnaxXiphos Art Thread
- Thread starter AnaxXiphos
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Stickies are for actual mods in the project, and a few other things.
As long as people continue to be interested in his artwork, which I expect they will, the thread will continue to stay high in the forums.
@AnaxXiphos: Could you please add all graphics posted in the thread to the first post, to make some kind of gallery/portforlio? I admire yout work and do not want to lose any pice of it 
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My intention is to post work-in-progress graphics to this thread, the same as any mod creator might post updates, and this should keep the thread near the top reasonably often.
@AnaxXiphos: Could you please add all graphics posted in the thread to the first post, to make some kind of gallery/portforlio? I admire yout work and do not want to lose any pice of it
I do intend to update the original post whenever I "finish" a particular set of graphics. I also intend to update when I revisit and improve anything I already completed. (Something which I tend to do reasonably often.)
Quite neat. Not sure it fits with the other employment icons though?Work in progress shot of what will hopefully be PB's soldier employment icon:
Are you redoing all 5?
That's overwhelmingly likely to be the plan, unless I figure out a way to make them match the vanilla employment icons a bit better. I've wrestled with the employment icons for a while now, and they're a real pain. Like a lot of the vanilla decision icons, they're pulled from larger paintings (many of them from art that appears elsewhere in the game as event pictures and whatnot.) This makes matching the style more difficult than usual. I tried pulling bits from other vanilla paintings, but as with many of the vanilla decision icons the results are mixed; some of the icons turn out okay, but a lot of them are really muddy.
If I had a functional tablet (and a bit more faith in my still fledgling painting skills) I'd just do a few small digital paintings and scale them down, which would probably provide the best match, but that's not a practical option for me at the moment. Perhaps in a month or two, when I've got a working tablet and a bit more practice under my belt, I'll be able to try it.
Edit:
Here's a modified version with a new face done from scratch (instead of being peeled off the martial councilor ambition trait) and put side-by-side with the previous one.
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In other news, also been working on some CK2+ traits on the side, so here's some concepts:
Left to right: Co Ruler, De Facto Ruler, Virgin Queen, Shieldmaiden (who's obviously going to have little helmeted children with the guy from the viking trait), Martial Lady
Left to right: Co Ruler, De Facto Ruler, Virgin Queen, Shieldmaiden (who's obviously going to have little helmeted children with the guy from the viking trait), Martial Lady
It's a bit old, but when you made religious icons for Ancient Religions mod one of the celtic options was a tree and you mentioned you had some more tree variants. If you still have them could you be willing to share them.
Okay, here we go!
From left to right: Eye of Horus, Traditional Ankh, Ankh with closed eye, Tree, Triskele 1, Triskele 2, Triskelion, and finally refurbished Trinity Knot. Note that none of the colors used here are set in stone; I varied them purely for effect, and if you want a particular design paired with a particular color, it's pretty trivial to change it up.
Some thoughts, for what it's worth:
Really am liking the Eye of Horus now that it shows up properly against dark backgrounds. I love the Ankhs, but since you seem pretty sure about the choice of Egyptian Paganism I'll probably be recycling them elsewhere. (I guess Lux Invicta is interested in using it, and VIET might someday, for all I know.)
As for the Celtic Paganism options, I couldn't find a way of coloring/shading the tree that I really liked; I have a few more tree variants as well, so if you end up really liking it I can run those by you. Out of the Triskele/Triskelion designs, I really don't care much for Triskele 1, I like Triskele 2, and I love the Triskelion. And lastly there's the refurbished Trinity Knot, which I think looks pretty good, too.
I keep a big ol' library of everything I make, so I absolutely still have the trees; I also have some smaller variants I made as druid traits for ACR. Do you want to see a lineup of all the variants, or are you asking for access to the base files?
Traitor!
I know, and I'm so shameless about it, too!
This represents most of the major variations. I never did arrive at something I was really happy with, but since it didn't win the ACR vote I also never had any real motivation to keep working on it. I also included one little tree just for show.
Go right ahead, just make sure I get credit and all that. Also, here's a better image with big and small versions and heresy colored versions in case those are needed:
You should be able to click through to flickr and save the original version from there. (In case you aren't familiar with flickr, to get to the original file click the image to go to the flickr page, then right click to open the menu and click original, then you'll end up at a page with a link specifically for downloading the original version. And yes, it's way more complicated than it needs to be.)
Excellent work! The art style of these graphics are consistent enough with vanilla that they don't look out of place at all.
Thanks, I appreciate the compliment. I really do love consistency, and I do put a lot of effort into making stuff that blends into the vanilla art reasonably well.
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And speaking of consistency... On the subject of the PB employment icons, I admit that I've kinda thrown in the towel on them for now. (Though I find it extremely likely that I'm going to revisit them later.) My experimental soldier icon doesn't look half bad, but took forever to make and doesn't match the vanilla employment icons. So I can either spend a very long time making five icons in the new style, or I can go back and hit vanilla art and pull some icons out of that, which would look like this:
From left to right: vanilla priest and steward for comparison purposes, diplomat (the background is from a vanilla event picture, but the dude is mine), soldier (from vanilla event picture), spy (also from vanilla event picture)
Also, I kind of want to swap the steward and diplomat icons.
The diplomat fits in really well, but the soldier and spy rather clash with the other three.
From left to right: vanilla priest and steward for comparison purposes, diplomat (the background is from a vanilla event picture, but the dude is mine), soldier (from vanilla event picture), spy (also from vanilla event picture)
Also, I kind of want to swap the steward and diplomat icons.
Actually, to my eye the vanilla priest and steward icons don't strictly match each other very well either. (In fact, the inconsistency amongst the vanilla decision icons kind of makes me eye twitch.) For the sake of balance I purposefully made the diplomat to look like the steward (the diplomat's background is from the same image as the steward, in fact), and tried to choose a soldier option that looked closer to the priest. There are some other candidates for soldier I can try, though.
But spy is more difficult; all the vanilla hooded/suspicious looking figures are either quite dim or have weird palettes. There is one guy who has an eyepatch instead (which is the game's other method of portraying spy types, apparently) but he's painted the same color as his background and doesn't show up very well at these sizes.