Today, I wanted to do something creative and I ended up drawing a few dozen face "elements" for bugbears and goblins. Elements are parts of a face like hair, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin and the like. The Face Generator then generates random combinations of these elements. If you only need to generate a handful of faces, you also just need a handful of elements. I drew 5 bugbear chins, 5 bugbear ears, 5 bugbear eyes, 5 bugbear faces (more like side burns), 5 bugbear hairstyles, 5 bugbear mouths, 6 bugbear noses, and that was enough for the following:
Next I drew 5 goblin ears, 10 goblin eyes, 19 goblin hair styles (helmets and bald heads), 9 goblin mouths and 10 goblin noses. This enabled me to generate the following:
There were difficulties, however. I got carried away while I was looking at the goblin faces from the Labyrinth movie where David Bowie plays the goblin king and started drawing helmets that half-covered the goblin eyes. It was very funny. But sadly, the other eyes had no helmets. I could add a bald head to every eye, which would limit recombinations, or I could add separate bald heads, but that was incompatible with eyes that had helmets.
The first step was therefore to remove the eyes from the helmets I had and use both helmets and bald heads for the "hair". The next problem was that these elements were misaligned: the helmets were supposed to half-cover the eyes and so they were very low. The palette I am using sadly only has one white colour and that colour is used for transparency when the elements are overlaid. The result is that you can't have an element like a helmet that is "filled" with white and covers eyes or skulls or whatever. No, they always shine through and that doesn't look good. So now I had to "lift" all the skulls so that there would be very little overlap with the eyes.
I keep telling myself that one day I will start a totally new collection. But then I don't because I like this small, incremental approach. I don't have the energy to redo it all.
In the mean time, you can generate some yourself:
The images are dedicated to the public domain. Feel free to use them for your projects. 😄
​#RPG ​#Face Generator
