A while back I made the AUG stymphalian birds which had a warm-mild reception, but felt to me like a high point in my work due to the rich historical reference material the design drew on. I wanted to have another stab so decided to make a similar design for another weapon associated with hunting.



Initially I was going to call this the Javelin (originally a greek spear used by ‘peltasts’) due to the length of the weapon, but there was a lack of potential illustrative subject matter to coincide with that name other than soldiers and patterns. I then read about the ‘Calydonian boar hunt’ which is a ‘hub story’ in greek literature as many well chronicled heroes of the olympian age team up to take on the task of hunting a ‘monster’ boar that was sent by the deity Artemis to wreak havoc in a region; note Artemis was a god of hunting. I felt a boar could be used as a stronger focal point and hence incorporated that into the design.

I ran into multiple issues on this project that have caused much delay:
‘The running men’ area was severely disrupted by image distortion that warped whatever detail I put between the first and second hunter. This strange warping also features elsewhere on the weapon barrel, the side pattern area, and the lower handle. Furthermore this area on the UV has very low resolution resulting in a low res jagged appearance; originally the hunters had much higher detail similar to the image reference I found, but I had to reduce and simplify several times to basic blocks with larger gaps. The end result is a rudimentary compromise that I’m a little uncomfortable with.

Other finish methods I tried were Hydrographic, which initially felt like a great option as the full gun area was accessable, however ‘trapping issues’ such as haloing around dark inks made the end result less than perfect for outline work. Custom also worked great with the same base texture, but I prefered the faint metallic properties that gunsmith gives due to the light exponent.

I stagnated on this one trying to counter these issues, but feel the need to move on! Let me know what you think, and if you would like to see more in this style.