The Gnomon Workshop January Art Challenge

So a few days ago a classmate told me about this site called The Gnomon Workshop and about the month art challenges that they run. Unfortunately for me, I found about this months challenge too late specially since the theme is really interesting...

A shield, thats what we had to create a 3D model of along with any texture maps that we need. There is no tri-count limit, and we don't have to bake the model down to a low res model. The only constraint, is that it has to be in the same visual style or fit into the world of a game like: World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Oblivion, etc. But I've been thinking about it, and I think that I'm going to do this challenge anyways even if I don't submit it to the site. I think that pushing myself to doing something on the side will really let me see how much my skills have improved.

So to start, tonight while I was in my hard surface modeling class I started to look at reference image of games like League of Legends and Tera, since these are two games that I've come to love. Here is a very simple front view of a concept image for the shield I want to make that I drew using Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop.

I still don't know what going to be on the middle of the shield, but I will keep working on it and I'm sure something cool will pop into my brain. I will post progress on my model as I mode forward, thanks for reading!