Character Concept + My Thoughts on Design

Hi there,

Long time no use lol. I was busy with a course (and may be as well for another 3 months depending on if I get accepted.) In any case, here's a recent artwork from myself. A lot of things have changed since my original intro, so here's a quick new one. My partner, who wrote fiction for about 20 yrs, and myself who has been drawing for an equal amount of time are working on a long comic project together. Originally we did some shorts however these were pretty much non-stories that were interrupted by study, and only were made for the sake of practicing my ability to panel. Since I had achieved that from the pages I had done for them, we decided to scrap them overall and just get to work on the project we actually cared about.

We have the story about 80% plotted out, so we're just working through the rest of the nitty gritty details. For sake of convenience I'll refer to the project as "SW" as I post more work about it in the future. On my end I'm trying to work through character designs.

Designing outfits for her culture is a pretty fun challenge. I always envisioned them to have multi-coloured outfits with lots of geometric shapes, inspired by the Karaya clan of Suikoden 3. The challenge comes from ensuring both the colours and patterns are overall balanced and not clashing in any way. Colours are fairly easy to figure out, using desaturated tones overall means they will typically harmonize a lot better. The issue is then just the patterns.

Don't want to be too repetitive overall (using the exact same triangle pattern on a shirt in the skirt and shoes for example would be boring), but still keeping within the boundaries of an overall theme. (Diamonds, in this case.) My personal philosophy is that if I go pattern or detail heavy in one area, I'm keeping that "bulk" as the focal point and then having much "lighter" patterns that even out the detail and act as "leads" in and out of the bulk on the rest of the space available. So as far as designing Soraia, I designed her head accessories first (necklace, earrings and headband.) Since they have a lot of fine details and jewels I designed her shirt around them so the eye would be immediately drawn to this area.

I could have left the skirt and shoes plain colours if I wanted to, but I don't like doing this because I feel like having all these intricate patterns and colours in the top would make the rest of the design feel unbalanced if the rest were simply plain. I settled on an extremely basic triangle pattern for the shoes, and a light diamond pattern that falls vertically through the skirt with just some minor colour contrast with the gold and cream. From head to toe, the patterns range from most intricate to least intricate. (Ideally the cream eye shadow should draw attention to the head, aswell.)

I gave myself a hard time by using a skirt that is the shape that it is... the weird tapering on the bottom made it hard to find a pattern that worked with it it's overall shape. But I think that's just my inexperience that made it hard. I also drew the toes on her left foot the wrong way, haha. (But maybe few people will notice! ;D)

Now whether I actually achieved any of what I talked about is up to the viewer, but I guess what I like about Steemit is the blog format lets me ramble alllll the nonsense in my head about what I'm thinking. I'm not a professional character designer by any means, but I really found that so far this has been the aspect I enjoy the most about my project and at the very least, people seem to enjoy the designs I have posted elsewhere so far. :>