moar freebiesssssssss 4 u allllll
(No, seriously, more fun stuff to play around with!)
This is probably the… 4th iteration I’ve done of these as a full set - I can’t help wanting to make them better after a year or two of looking at them and then finding something that I now think I could do better. But, on the plus side, they almost always seem to improve between iterations and that’s the main goal.
Genealogy of the Holy War Regalia
(Lustrous Sword (Sigurd’s Silver Sword), Balmung, Mystletainn, Tyrfing, Gáe Bolg, Gungnir, Helswath, Yewfelle)
(Valflame, Mjölnir, Forseti, Naga, Loptous, Valkyrie, Deirdre’s Circlet)
- (You just know that they’ll make Sigurd’s Silver Sword a Prf if they get around to doing an Echoes of Genealogy, so might as well get ahead of the curve on that front.)
As always of late, I’ve included two little palette swatches to easily have the standard light green used on the sheets from the game data applied to replace the working grey that I use.
I also realize that I never really addressed it when I posted the updated Heroes icon set, but I do use my own customized tome border design that I did from scratch (yet based on the normal GBAFE one), mainly just so I could say that it’s my own original work and not using anything that IS’s staff had done, beyond the palette. If for some reason you would want to conform to the regular design, it’s pretty easy to do a rectangle select on the design on the tome and paste it over an icon that uses the regular border. (You would end up missing out on the minor amounts of detail that I put along the tomes’ spines, though.)
Hit the blurb below if you want detail in what each icon was pulled from or any other thoughts from my work process:
Info dump
Most of the icons I do these days are usually derived from either 1) the old FE TCG artwork, 2) any thing that shows up amongst any of the new FE Cipher artworks, or 3) other official art, be it old artbooks or even Heroes (art or in-game models). Usually in that descending order, unless it’s something specific that I need to go to a specific well to get image sources for.
Sigurd’s Silver Sword, for instance, is based primarily on the two Cost 4/3 Sigurd artworks that Mayo did for Cipher Series 12, since I felt that the one personally given to him by His Majesty (via Arvis) shouldn’t just be an ordinary Silver Sword.
Most of the other Regalia started as their old FE TCG components and then had bits molded in from other sources as it felt right to do so (or if there was any to pull in to begin with - the Circlet basically has nothing outside of the FE TCG artwork, for instance) - Balmung had its blade turned blue-ish and the crossguard be more gold-colored as reference to Shanan’s Cost 4/3 Cipher artworks, while the handle was redesigned to match the Awakening redesign and include a little tassel off of the end. Mystletainn started with the old FE TCG and then I used the Heroes battle model to get a better idea of how to do the crossguard. And so on and so forth.
Yewfelle and Loptous were probably the hardest to do - Yewfelle just by the “complexity” of its design with the added components on the front of the bow (and the Cipher artwork is of no help due to angles shown and how even more complex and machinery like the artists designed it), while Loptous was difficult due to the fact that the official FE World artwork (basically the only usable reference) has it with predominantly dark colors - dark purple, black, magenta, red - all colors where you don’t have a lot of options in FE’s default palette and ones that tend to not contrast very well with each other when used at the same time. Honestly, this one’s final state just kind of resulted from trial and error while mirroring Naga’s tome and finally hitting on a color combination and balance that seemed to work better than anything else I had tried.
Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to doing a new version of my old Weapon Icon Tutorial, given that it’s like 7-8 years old at this point and I’ve learned a lot more since then. While the overall idea is still the same (load up an image off to the side and mentally translate colors and pixel locations to get an approximate recreation at a smaller scale), I feel like I could articulate my process better now, while also incorporating more detail into the designs at the same time. (I mean, look at the icons in the “Old sheet of freebie Weapon Icons” image in the top post and compare the quality level and amount of detail in the icons.) Just as long as it isn’t some of the Heroes tome designs with their overuse of flat colors… >:[