Malistaire the Undying Player Gear Concept

Paige Moonshade recently held a Costume Contest on her blog HERE. The contest, challenging contestants to design their own Halloween costume using a character gear template, led me to create a player version of Malistaire the Undying's gear. Because let's be honest, he's pretty creepy. Let me walk you through the process.

I simply asked myself, "Who's the creepiest character around?" Malistaire the Undying was one of the first to come to mind. His outfit has actually been long sought-after by fans around the Spiral, and so what better Halloween costume to create than his outfit?

Vector Illustrations Explained

The interesting thing about this concept is that it's all vector. So there are no images outside the Wizard101 logo and the moon photo (B.O.X.E.S. Event) in one of the panels above. In fact, vector is all shapes, lines, and so on. Vector does NOT allow for:

• Photoshop brushes
• Filters or pre-made textures
• Manipulation of pre-existing images or image combining
• Drop shadows, feathering, glows, soft edges or brushes

It's all done in Adobe Illustrator. Vector means that I can zoom in as close as I want and it will never be pixelated or blurry because it's lines, curves, and shapes, as opposed to individual pixels filled with color. If you look closely in the image above, you can see that a few of the objects there are selected. You'll notice plenty of gradients, which are a huge help when doing vector illustrators, as they WILL scale in vector format. You can also see a fairly close zoom on the top-right panel of the first image.

Building From Scratch

Unlike image editing and manipulation, using Illustrator requires you to create everything yourself. You can use things like the current version of Malistaire the Undying and the male character gear template as I did, but you still have to build everything yourself - there's no cutting and pasting from images.

I've included a couple of images that show all of the lines required to create the look of an area - take a look at the middle-right panel of the first image (illustration shown in outline mode) and this one to the right with everything selected.

Creating a Concept Feel

Once all of the lines, shapes, gradients, and so on are completed, I ended up with a clean, finished look to the outfit. However, I wanted to present it as a concept. What this required was going back through with dark, black lines to outline some of the major parts of the illustration, as well as the overall outfit. I even added a little bit of back lighting like you see so often.

One this is complete, it is placed on a grey background with some shading and shadows done. I then added three panels on the original image to show a couple of different aspects. The first to demonstrate its vector scalability (though no online image format is in vector, so these are all PNGs), the second to show all of the lines and shapes used to create the outfit, and the third to show it without the black lines and in context.

With this, I have completed the final concept. I had lots of fun trying it out, and I'll likely be creating some of my own outfits in the future. As always, thanks for reading and see you in the Spiral!