In this week’s Insider, I’m going to take a look at developing the color palette for the latest Warcaster Faction, the Empyreans.

Above, you’ll see various initial schemes I explored. Matt Wilson and I had always seen their armor as being primarily white, and after my initial pass varying up the metals between steel and brass/gold, I wasn’t digging it, so I explored several other options, including some gradient passes. The one aspect that wasn’t quite hitting the mark was the magenta glow. It was too pink; we wanted to veer that toward purple. This gave me the idea that their glow should be a blacklight wherein any light-colored objects near it would glow, and I could work that into their illustrations. Before that revelation, I worked up the following color options, trying to push them even further than the previous roughs.

Although there was some potential with these, they also weren’t quite making the grade, so I abandoned the aged brass-and-copper feel in favor of the original white idea and focused more on monochromatic schemes instead.

In this round, the focus was on various options for gray and white and even a little blue experimentation. The warmer, almost eggshell white armor of number one, as well as the purple glow, was a winner as was the medium grey steel in number five.

This, then, became the master color palette for the Empyreans, but we wanted to age it, add some more purple, and dirty it up. And with that, we had our final color palette.

All that was left was to incorporate this scheme into the rest of the Faction and produce an illustration to announce their arrival to the rest of the universe. The work’s description, then…

In an almost featureless desert landscape at high noon with light earth tones, and the entire setting very blanched out—a dull sky with white-baked earth below—we see an Empyrean heavy warjack striding toward the camera menacingly.

In the mid-background is an Empyrean battle carrier, which is like a flying skyscraper with high-tech “angelic” wings that are akin to enormous high-tech fins, reminiscent of wings. They’re the equivalent of the arc receivers we see on the Alliance ship, so they need to have glowing surfaces to tell us they are. It should be very tall and imposing, like a god looming over the battlefield.

On the same vertical plane as the battle carrier is an Empyrean army. They’re spread out shoulder to shoulder, squads, solos, and warjacks alike. These can be in silhouette, but it would be great to be able to read some of the real Empyrean silhouettes in this lineup. They should spread from border to border so we can’t tell how big the army really is. A dust cloud billows up behind them to emphasize how many of them there are. It should feel like thousands.

Behind the carrier and the army is a void gate. The battle carrier has just emerged from the void gate and spawned the army. The whole composition should relate back to the void gate, with the idea that they have all just come through as a massive invasion force.

With the description in hand, illustrator Vincent Lefevre worked up some thumbnail sketches.

Sketches 1–3 were worked up by Vincent, and #4 was my mashup of 1 and 2. The only added note was that we would need to see the light vehicle in the sky. With that, Vincent worked up sketch #5.

With this, he was cleared to proceed to final. As the illustration advanced, several small adjustments were made and we had a few sidebar conversations about the weapon load outs, glow intensity, etc. And in the end, we ended up with the final illustration presented below.

And now they’re coming.

With the arrival of the Empyreans close at hand, be prepared to see a lot more of them in our upcoming Kickstarter launching October 19! Watch the livestream kick-off at 10am pacific October 19th at twitch.tv/privateerpress.