Hi, guys!
This is my first post here^^
I am happy to present you my finished concept of the game boss - the Silver Queen Guinevere - for the dark fantasy project as a part of the Legend of King Arthur challenge.
The Aim of the project was to mix the King Arthur legend with dark fantasy Dark Souls-inspired style and to develop a story that would not only work for this character only, but also will be potentially applicable for the other Arthurian characters 
I hope you enjoy this!
P.S. If you can’t see GIFs with animation - check them out here at my ArtStation Page:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oOmk6B
Here is the first things I came up with before creating concept art - I created the reference boards and written down the short summary:
Then I thought closely of the concept and drew a quick 2d sketch to understand what elements would work well with Guinevere’s design:
As a boss she will have 2 stages: the first one - easier and hence the design will be more simple: we will see her only in her nun clothes with flashes of silver armour.
When Guinevere’s HP fall down to a certain point, her nun clothes will burn (the way Guinevere war meant to burn at the stake for her infidelity) and leave her with full armour set that was hiding all the time underneath her nun dress. She will become more fierce both in terms of looks (shapes/silhouette, embellishments, clothing material proportions - more metal of different kind, hair style) and her battle style. Her armour embellishments will incorporate the carving of the curse, that Guinevere got from the Lady of the Lake and (maybe) glimmer as a burning lava from time to time, reminding that originally she was to be burned at the stake.
So here was the Base Mesh that I was working with.
I had to understand what kind of armour embellishment type I wanted to have - the cavity or the extrusion. The needs of the project dictated to go with the second one because it will allow to create additional storytelling element within the very line of extrusion (in my case it will be Lady of the Lake’s curse carved onto the extrusion).
Next thing was to understand how to make the whole armour sculpting both cheaper in terms of production (cause I would spend literally a century carving every single detail by hand) and unique - so that we don’t have the same words cheaply mirrored from one plate to another one.
First step was to think on that extrusion effect and depth would each element have
Here are my first baby steps in alpha creation - just to get the look - and then proceed with other armour parts
Now a few words about the curse and textual storytelling.
I always try to get deep into the story while creating a character and included a few days on working with ancient Old English sources that would help create the curse in the most authentic way.
I was having a very deep course of culture studies and immediately got to learning the Old English/Anglo-Saxon most prominent works as well as some Latin and vernacular stuff. I payed the greatest attention on The Exeter Book which has some riddles with interesting language peculiarities, Beowulf and of course - Project Gutenberg trying to dive mostly into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself.
First I thought about writing the whole sentences but it would seem lame - we have lots of curves that either split or intersect with one another.
Here are some of the collocations I used to form sentences (thank you, Linguistics Department, you gave me the exact knowledge i needed :D)
After that - TONS of sculpting anf funny hair styling
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and thank you for your attention!
