This Dungeon Dwellers icon set was created for an assignment in my Advanced Problems in Graphic Design 1 course at University of Missouri - St. Louis. The icons in the set are ten of my favorite monsters from the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game.

I took inspiration from existing descriptions and artwork of the creatures I chose. The blue monochromatic color scheme was used to represent the monsters lurking in the darkness, with yellow accents to highlight their eyes and other intimidating features. I also made a set of RPG dice as ornaments for the rest of the set.

Finally, I animated each icon using digital cell animation, drawing each frame by hand in Illustrator on my iPad and making .GIFs in Photoshop. 

Here's a closer look at each icon in the set:

Process:

At the beginning of the project, I wanted to make item and spell icons in addition to monsters. I sat down for around 5 hours and sketched thumbnails of as many monsters, items, and spell effects as I could remember from my own Dungeons & Dragons sessions.

After reviewing my thumbnails with my peers, I set about sketching and vectorizing the ideas I thought would work best as icons. I hadn't decided on a color scheme or style at that point, so my early ideas were all over the place.

I determined that the items and spells were too generic; not specific enough to Dungeons & Dragons. I threw out all the non-monster icons and replaced them with monsters that looked fun to animate.

After the slight change of subject matter, I resumed sketching monsters with renewed focus. I first sketched each monster and their animation frames in Procreate before vectorizing them in Illustrator with the pen and pencil tools. I also drew a set of RPG dice to use as ornaments for the rest of my icons.