First off, for those of you into the Wargame/Role-Playing Game, it’s not that Warhammer. This was a logo for a Mixed Martial Arts studio that I did through Empty Room Studios. Superficially, it does have some similarities to the game property. They both have a larger-than-life sense of design, with sensuous exaggerated musculature and rounded, yet chunky, massive form. The instructions from the customer were “an image of a viking/warrior/beastman smashing a warhammer (or probably a sledge hammer) into a stone version of their company name WarHammer MMA“.
My first three sketches were as follows:
Sketch 1) I didn’t like MMA on the same line as “Warhammer” since it made the letters too skinny. Since the design would otherwise have a less than powerful “L” shape, I added them as a banner off to the right. Wasn’t entirely happy with it.
Sketch 2) Better lettering. Now it looks like that hammer is having to do some work.
Sketch 3) Here is where inspiration strikes. By writing out the full title, I can put them on an arc. This does several things. It clears up the ambiguity of the acronym, MMA. The arc gives the feel of the hammer swing in motion, giving a dynamism the former designs lacked. Finally, it pulls the design elements together into a unified whole, framing the main character and pulling the action from the face down to the body of the logo type.
I sent all three to the customer, however. Sometimes it helps to stack your odds of doing a design you really like, by including some of your early rejections. This can backfire if the client winds up liking a design you really have no confidence in, or affinity to.
This did in fact happen to a degree after the first round of proofs. The cusomer liked the design from Sketch 3, but preferred the spidery “weak” lettering from Sketch 1. His biggest complain however, was regarding the horns on the helmet. He was not a fan of the traditional fantasy Viking-esque helmet (as an aside, real Vikings did not wear horns, in defiance of Hollywood’s insistence), and asked for horns that pointed more downward. I gave him sketches 4 and 5. I really thought that the thinner lettering was wrong for the design, but you can’t really push something the client doesn’t like. So I gave him the new horn design, and offered to show it to him with the:
Sketch 4) Skinny lettering
Sketch 4) and the blocky lettering
Bingo. The client was now on board with the heavy lettering, but the comment that came back on the horns was “A little longer horns and it will be perfect.”. The art director at Empty Room Studios (my go-between on this), suggested, “I would go with something large and intimidating, Keith. Perhaps something ridged like a ram’s horn but curving down like you have them. I’m thinking something more “video gamish” instead of your traditional fantasy. Does that make sense?”
This gave us Sketch 6) The horns are longer, but still not enough.
The response was, “The client is still not sure about the horns. Can we try ram horns?” This time, I took no chances. Instead of pulling horns out of the ether of my imagination, I did an image search on ram horns, looking through many pictures of Bighorn Sheep until I really stared to get a feel for them and what was possible.
Sketch 7) This was the hit. It got the thumbs up to move forward.
I will reserve the technical details of creating a digital painting for a different post, since this one is more about the evolutionary process of creating a design to match the client’s needs. Instead, I will skip to the rendered piece.
Final Painting 1) This has all sorts of textures applied to the lettering and to the arch. The big beefy barbarian at once looks powerful yet kind of goofy. This makes him engaging as a symbol while still retaining that “badass” quality the client specified.
The client liked the piece in principle, but still wasn’t quite happy with it. The comment that came back was, “He likes everything, but wants it darker. . . more evil I suppose. He mentioned the movie Pathfinder and the Deathdealer paintings. I think he wants something more “gritty”. He mentioned dark colors like grey, black, brown, and red as his favorites.”
For those not into fantasy art, The Death Dealer is a classic painting by the grandmaster of fantasy illustration, Mr. Frank Frazetta. Pathfinder is a pastiche of this painting by Michael Muller for the eponymous film.
If this were pre-digital, I would be up a creek. I’d need to re-do the entire painting. And it would be my fault for not going through the steps of color roughs first. One of my bad habits is that I don’t like to work on a piece in dribs and drabs. Once I am in the mood, I want to go! This is a bad instinct for a graphic artist.
Fortunately, changing the color cast of a piece is not that drastic for modern technology. The painting was on many layers and had some complex effects, so it wasn’t a matter of “pushing the darker and grittier button”, but it wasn’t a terrible task to re-work the color. It also gave me the impetus to change a few things I wasn’t entirely happy with, such as the teeth.
Here is the final piece as the client accepted it:
For those curious about the client, it appears that they now manufacture and sell martial arts apparel.