Hello, everybody! In this week’s Concept to ’Crate, I’m going to discuss the concept for Flugwug, “The Hero We Deserve.” This concept was fairly simple and straightforward in nature. Inspired by a brooding comic book hero with a large cape and who likes to hang out on top of buildings, this MiniCrate version of Flugwug is a fan of that character and has even made his own hero costume. For this task, I tapped Billy Dallas Patton, as I felt that with his comic book background, he was the perfect artist for the job.

For the first iterations of this concept, Billy submitted some sketches with Flugwug crouched on top of a gargoyle. Unfortunately, with Flugwug crouched, he’s not giving off the heroic vibe we were looking for, and it compresses too much of the figure, which would both make him difficult to paint and diminish his presence on the table.

As we moved into a second round of sketches, I requested Billy stand Flugwug up in a more classic hero pose, and Billy sent me these sketches:

Unfortunately, in this format, we lost a lot of Flugwug’s proportions, so I quickly sketched up an alternate that leaned more into his original shape.

For the next round of iterations, we came up a few options that were getting much closer. The proportions still needed a bit more work, so I sketched up some adjustments. The other problematic part of the design was that the gargoyle itself was too tall, and we needed to cut down the mass of that considerably. In the sketch on the right, you’ll see how much mass I wanted to cut!

Billy got to work and drew up the final overall design, which only needed a bit of tweaking to the pose…

With that, the concept was complete and uploaded for Ron to assign it to a sculptor!

I hope you’ve enjoyed looking at the concept art process for Flugwug’s alternate sculpt “The Hero We Deserve.” If you play Riot Quest or you’re looking for something new to paint, there’s a new mini each month through MiniCrate!