What you'll learn

Fantasy games have long been known for their beautiful and ornate melee weapons. While often times completely unrealistic, these fantasy weapons can be things of beauty that are sought after by players as an in-game reward. How would an artist even begin to come up with these fantastic designs? Follow along in this training to find out. We'll get started by brainstorming some aggressive but seemingly random silhouette shapes. These shapes don't have a purpose just yet, but hang tight: they will. From there, we'll become a bit more intentional and focus on creating shapes that will become the blades of our weapons. With all these varying shapes created, we'll spend one lesson looking at ways we can combine them to create a completed silhouette for both symmetrical and asymmetrical weapons. Next, we'll sketch some forms on the silhouette and move into rendering them out in grayscale.To wrap up this tutorial, we'll learn how to apply and refine color on top of our grayscale weapon. Software required: Photoshop CC 14.2.