Alex Fruen takes us through his process for designing and creating a fan-inspired Knightmare dungeon room.
I wouldn't call myself an artist by any means but I've always been inspired by David Rowe's artwork for Knightmare.
His paintings had incredible atmosphere and realism which really added to the magic of the show. I remember trying to draw my own dungeon rooms as a kid (with pretty terrible results) and now years later I have some great digital tools like Photoshop to work with so I was curious to see if I could produce something that might be up to a fairly decent standard.
I work at a print shop and use Photoshop all the time so this is a great way to develop my skills for work. I'm pretty happy with the results even if it is a very basic room design. I'm now intending to do some much more complex designs with some original puzzles too!
The Process
1. I started off by using the 'Nilrem' room as a basis for my artwork. I chose to use this room as it is simple and it allowed me to trace the perspective lines fairly easily.
2. You will notice that the side walls extend outwards to give the feeling of a wide angle, this was a recurring feature in David Rowe's paintings, so I was very keen reproduce it as closely as possible.
3. I decided that I wanted the texture of the walls to be layered stone and after searching the web I stumbled across this one which fitted the theme nicely.
4. The textures were distorted to fit onto my grid.
5. This was repeated for the back and side walls.
6. I found a nice stone archway image on the web that would fit with the other texture I had used.
7. The archway was placed on the wall and distorted to keep in line with the perspective.
8. A segment of the wall was removed for the doorway.
9. The archway texture was cut into pieces and stitched together to give the appearance of a 3D doorway. This was the most complex part of the project. The floor was also extended under the arch to make it look like the door actually goes somewhere and isn't just a black rectangle.
10. This was repeated for the back wall using the same method, but just working on a different line of perspective.
11. Some gradient shading was added to each segment of the wall to give the image more depth.
12. The contrast was amped up and some noise was added to give the image a grittier feel. I wanted to try and steer away from the perfectly sharp rendered CGI look and try and stay truer to David Rowe's hand-painted style.
Hope you guys enjoy, would love some criticism/feedback!
Alex can be found on the Knightmare.com foum as AcidSkies. Take a look too at his unofficial Knightmare DVD case designs.
