Faction Visual Design - Soldiers of the White City

 

Of all the factions and polities in Barony, the White City has always been the hardest for me to draw and think about visually. Part of this is scale - the images for these guys are not individuals, they are flows, trends, forces, closer in spirit to the 'chaos scenes' that make up so much of the art of this project. 

In theory it should not be so difficult, because I can describe a White City Soldier to you just fine. They are shod in bright, machined steel, which has a strange (to a Baronial) blank and utilitarian look to it, their armour is painted with the images of their game, and they have chemical lanterns and injector systems built into the pauldrons and chest.

In movement they are horribly fast for something so heavily armoured, they sprint towards you stooped way over, close to the ground, often reaching out to grab and break, and always twitching, tics, and other involuntary movements. They sing and scream as they fight, they 'break teeth', the world around them is reduced to poison chaos, to mud and wind and blood and clouds of boiling acid, and the battle music drowns out everything and drones without ceasing. They are long and thin, like horrible steel scarecrows. Their swords are heavier than they look, and they swing them around like log splitters. They are the only faction in the setting who can reliably do the Guts thing of chopping through armour. 

There is obviously a lot to work with here, but the actual image has always eluded me. I found myself veering into Turner-style abstractions (a common veer for me for sure!) when it came to actually visualising these people. I think it is because it's quite an important image to get right in the setting, and this feeling of important-ness has meant that my usual sketchy, intuitive, easy approach to drawing has been blocked. 

I recently saw some images on Instagram of old hockey goalie masks, designed to intimidate. Something clicked immediately. You will see what I mean:

What I like about these masks:

• They are really weird - they play with the dimensions of the face and head, they are sometimes representing (skulls and tigers) and sometimes non-representing (the face as a blank). 
• They are visually coded: they use iconic imagery to refer to teams and cities - legible to insiders who know that they speak to, abstract or opaque to outsiders. 
• They are colourful, flashy, made to be memorable.  
• You can often see the human eyes and face of the person inside it. The White City militaries are made up of people, and this is important to include in the design. They eyes are especially important here. You can watch them watching you, you can see that something is fucked up with their eyes, see that they are too high to care about what they're doing, see them register one another as human but not you, and so on. 

To go with these designs, I wanted to crack a baseline body/armour shape to mix in with the various helmet designs. I think it looks something like this:

Long and thin, exaggerated armour design, pauldrons incorporating the specialist kit. 

The red zones and Xs represent image-surfaces where individual soldiers might play the game with one another on campaign, as a kind of stand in 'anything here' visual motif. 

I would really like to get at least one big piece of art of a White City 'intervention' together at some point, and I suspect this will form a reference for that larger work.