Broken Falcon was my bigtime comic-project before I created Felicity. It's my oldest story and has seen the most evolution and growth, it's an ongoing project that I'm happy to continue working on. Crimson Feather Studios is a name originating from Broken Falcons Crimson feathered protagonist- Red.
I may repeat some uploads here but largely stuff I've not posted before. All my Broken Falcon stuff is concept, it's rough and ready- I just don't do much with any of it! So I figured I should atleast bunch together the images I'd chose to upload to various spots about my net-haunts.
So- ranging from years to months old, and in no sensible order- art dump away!
Broken Falcon centres around an alien planet and as such sports all kinds of weird and wonderful creatures within. While it has established history and a set number of 'local' species; it houses many bizarre races from all over the unexplored world and presents a different kind of challenge when designing characters. I enjoy concepting for this world so much because it really requires imagination, that is to say the sky is the limit. There's a great freedom in concepting a creature with personality.
If I recall, this is an early concept for Widow, a slaver town on the outskirts of Ironside;the enemies land.
Colours and shapes were playing a part for me when I started to define Carrison, the planet the story takes place. I had a big bunch of landscape concept art that brought me to my conclusive palette, this is a real early test, I will have to dig up the many concepts that followed this one.
The latest additions to the story came when I fleshed out the childhood of the hero, previously it had played little part in the eventual cause and effect besides a few key events scattered early in the time line. I found myself able to create reason for many traits, effects, characters and plot lines by almost creating an entirely new story in his earliest years. Young Red allows me to fully explore and explain his tribal upbringing which strengthens the ties his race have to Carrison and going back even further to before his birth- exploring his heritage and folklore was a joy.
Reds race is that of the Carinians; A bird like-species that are the first known to have lived among Carrison. The story divides at a point into very stark opposites(actually demonstrated quite well below!)and as do the Carinians. Although their history dictates certain restrictions I wanted the heroes species to be as diverse as humans, setting myself only limits of similarity such as feet, eyes, head-tufts and gender-specific traits like tail shape. Trying ultimately to create extremely unique side-characters that are still easily identifiable as Carinians and not any kind of similar race. One aspect I debated 'locking' for all of Carinians was beak-shape, ultimately deciding not to as we humans have extremely diverse nose-shapes, allowing for extremely different looks and I wanted to echo that. Instead I enforced only that Male Carinians would have sharp, often longer beaks while the females had short and smoother beaks.
The first ever established point in the story was that the death of love. Loosing his life 'breaks' him and what follows is the downward spiral of a hero, amoungst the rise of a tyrant and a brutal war. It's the key theme that is shown throughout with decisions and choices affecting how a life can turn out. This particular piece is MIGHTY rough but it demonstrated my ideas of how to best reflect the story, I used a similar theme/tagline in the poster above the last. It's important to the entire story, at the centre of it all. And the story has always been a Love Story.
I did this to demonstrate how I colour, I think! It shows an important late-entry to the story however, Snow! Ironside was originally a very orange/black/steamy/industrial/hot/dry environment. My evolutions brought that to a complete opposite establishing that the enemy race could only thrive in cold conditions, while the heroes race die in cold conditions. It threw up alot of cool possibilities for the story and was an evolution that only came about as I began to think about the limitations of the environment to its locals and about why certain boundries had never been crossed until conflict.
If I recall, this is an early concept for Widow, a slaver town on the outskirts of Ironside;the enemies land.
Tests for in-comic quality. For the longest time I was evolving my style of drawing(I still am)so I have a horrible tendency to have inconsistent work; it is one of the many reasons a comic of Broken Falcon hasn't seen the light of day, during these tests however I was trying to find a balance between time and effort, that would of allowed me to make a comic. It didn't work!
Just an old rough thumbnail for a comic page, there are old elements of the story that still remain in its current state, I tried to not alter too much of my original intentions and instead tried to re-enforce and strengthen the story-reasons why they happen. At this point in the story we see pre-war Red(Two eyes!)and Sunro.
Early ideas for the newer scripts revolved around picking up Reds story much later on into his life, one such idea involved a hanging where he was introduced to the audience as a lawbreaker and considered anything but a Hero.
Broken Falcons debut story is called Crossroads, I had intended to create and release the issue in a collected volume but my focus with the project shifted to different areas and I just put it on the backburner.
The major characters in the first ever story were originally Sonic Fan-characters, hence why they all follow an animal-esque appearance. As I evolved the characters and shifted them into an original universe, where I built my story around them- I tried to maintain my design 'roots' but at the same time try to create something more alien than animal.
Originally the Aragnos character in the story was a just a Spider character and the only one at that- when designing the races of Broken Falcon much later on I wanted to allow myself the room to expand on the character and flesh out the many different looks and builds available to the second largest species in the story. Their expanded role demanded much variation in a very similar way to the heroes species.
-T
