Observer:Profiles:An Interview With Kitty
1) Although you have only been contributing to wesnoth for a few months now, you have produced a complete set of (very nice) portraits for the elves. Why did you do it? What motivated you?
I discovered Wesnoth roughly two month before I started to contribute. I just had fun playing and then decided to take advantage of one of the options a open source project offers - becoming part of it. I just doodled a quick portrait for the elvish fighter and with the help of the forum guys developed the now official portrait style out of it. I chose the elves because there were no portraits done yet. In fact I misunderstood that every faction could have it's own graphical style and only wanted to settle one for the elves... Concerning my personal reasons for contributing to wesnoth, I'm a graphic design student and always enjoyed drawing and illustrating, too. Most of my university and freelance stuff is type and vector graphics. Wesnoth is a great opportunity to break out of that while still doing something useful and not only drawing in my sketchbook but receiving comments and encouragement. I do have some minor illustration courses, but the reputation of anything fantasy related and this kind of realism is very very bad - if i showed my professor what i do for wesnoth, the best that could happen would be that he laughed at me, worst that i would be kicked out of his class. On the other hand it is my graphical education which enables me to do what I do for Wesnoth. To cut a long story short, the Wesnoth project allows me to combine my loves for illustration, gaming and fantasy.
2) What program(s) or method(s) do you use to create the art? How come? What is your favorite technique?
I produce my work for Wesnoth entirely digital (photoshop only if it matters). I feel at home in this program it allows me to work pretty fast, has layer management and a whole lot of options. I rely heavily on my wacom tablet, a wonderful invention which simulates a natural brush/pen. I chose the digital medium for my wesnoth works mainly for it's velocity, because I wanted to produce a lot of portraits as fast as possible - no drying times, scanning, tidying afterwards etc. For other purposes I work in vector graphics, acrylics, oils, crayon, water colour and so on. I enjoy mixing media and often bring it together digitally in the end.
See more in kitty's Portrait_Tutorial
3) What do you think you will do next?
After I put the Wesmere project to an end I will apply myself to the big portrait project Jetryl already announced. We plan to give every unit a generic portrait! There were many attempts to give single units portraits, but they all failed more or less in unifying the style and finishing the job. Wesnoth has a high graphical standard, especially for an open source project - I really love those cute sprites - but the portraits don't match these standards and let the game appear less professional. The problem is that personal style carries much more weight in this case than in the sprites or attack symbols projects. We want to upgrade all existing portraits and add new ones in the style I established: inked outlines, soft digital shading and realistic appearance. I will start working at the mages, which will be 18 portraits alone. As one can see it is quite a lot of work ahead, in a perfect world we would want 193 pictures! But for reality's sake I aim for 102, of which are 17 done, which still leaves 85.
4) What do you think of the state of the art in mainline Wesnoth? In the user made campaigns and eras?
As I already stated Wesnoth has an astonishing high state of art, not only for an open source project. Being a visual person I have to admit that it was the polished surface which attracted me to the game besides the playing it. The terrains are great, the only thing I still dream of are seasons, the sprites are cute and detailed and even little items like the attack symbols received a lot of love. One thing that bothers me are the story images, I highly enjoy a well written campaign but in most cases the story images are either blank, photographs, collages or even screenshots. Because I believe good story art will help to bring the player into the story, I would like to produce a big set of "generic" pictures which would cover typical scenes and settings like landscapes, battlefields, castles and so on, after the portraits are finished. Especially user made campaigns could benefit from that. Regarding the state of art in UMCs and eras, I think it is obvious that there are less people involved than in mainline and because of that the state of art is still lower. There are a lot of little gems but e.g. the style of the different factions within one era varies widely sometimes. But I believe this will only be a matter of time - once they become more popular, they'll get more contributors. Same goes for good campaigns - once they are polished and they are made ready for mainline, they will get better art (like I do for Wesmere right now).
5) Why have you chosen Wesnoth to draw for? What attracted you to the game? Why have you stayed?
Initially I started playing together with my boyfriend, making it through campaigns together, competing in multiplayer and working together in multiplayer campaigns is a lot of fun. It's a nice little geeky hobby for us. And it is again the possibility to contribute (or at least the plans to do so) which kept us, we plan to write a campaign one day - he doing the code and me doing the art. The other thing that made me stay is the active forum respectively the art sub forums. On the one hand the comments and critiques improve the art and otherwise it's just easier to keep working if you know there's someone interested in what you are doing. Keeping this art community nice, active and healthy will hopefully attract even more artist for our project. Something like the "organized art topic" is a step in the right direction, I believe - I could imagine that we could perhaps improve our new art blood recruitment by offering more workshops and coaching.