For today’s Insider, I’m going to talk about the redesign and updated concept art for the Satyxis Raiders, which release this week.

When I caught wind a little over a year and a half ago that we were going to do this, I did my best to make space to do the concept art myself. Getting a little carried away, I drew a lot of inspiration from the original concept art and worked up a couple of loose sketches with several pose options that I derived from watching videos on whip wielding.

I then had to set these concepts to the side for a bit to take care of other art direction-related tasks. After a couple of weeks, I re-opened the concepts, and by this time, I had started thinking about what I could do to incorporate some of the new design aesthetic we had introduced with the Satyxis Gunslingers to could make them a bit more of a cohesive unit. I scrapped my original sketches and started working up some quick silhouettes studies over the poses.

Silhouettes allow us to get a good feel of what the figures might look like on the table, and in this case, they helped me think about any potential limitations with the attire.

I then started sketching up some outfit options but, once more, art direction chores ramped up, and I wasn’t going to be able to finish them. As they were fairly far along, I sent the chosen pose sketches, my roughs, and the gunslingers off to Andrea Uderzo to finish them up.

One thing that I haven’t presented in this was the whip redesign process. When designing a non-traditional whip for miniatures, there are a lot of production concerns that come into play, so this was a tricky process on its own. Those sketches have been lost to the digital ether, but you can see the final above.

For the figures, I had Andrea proceed directly to final sketches, using my art and the gunslingers as inspiration, and I thought he did a fantastic job of maintaining the look and feel of that work. As expected, we immediately approved the art as final and put them into the sculpting cue.

These new models are available on shelves or online tomorrow (Mar 16, 2018)!