I've been quite bad at keeping the blog side of this project updated these past few months, mainly due to family, Uni work and other aspects of life taking up most of my time. I managed to combat this by maintaining a presence on Behance via the WIP posts I frequently made for each section of the project, responding to feedback as it came my way.
At this point in time I've completed the work for the assignment and now it's my intention to produce blog posts that will give insight to my thoughts and developments of each stage of the project. I can still remember a lot of the essential points that I considered while working on these sketches and illustrations, so it shouldn't be too difficult to present detailed accounts of what I was thinking at the time. I'll present a separate blog post for each section of the project, starting with where I left off...
This stage was all about getting some design ideas down fast, to give me something I could refer to later when determining the best elements for the Spellsword character. In my previous post I sketched out a few different appearances that might be interesting for this type of character. I'd felt a strong connection with the leftmost sketch of the four I presented; she seemed to possess a confident, ruthless attitude that I felt would benefit the darker side of a fantasy genre female warrior/mage.
With that in mind, I began these sketches. The hairdo was an important starting point as I feel it's an important element in a character and can really benefit the overall design. I tried out several styles here, bearing in mind that I was also trying to integrate a retro-fantasy/'80's twist on things - hence some rather dubious 'dos.
Short hair was really appealing to me, so I carried that through onto the next sketches, where I dabbled in some torso armour designs for her. Two things that I really want to get more of in my work are high detail and flow, so I'm always thinking of ways to explore this throughout each stage of the design process. I played around with some detailed armour designs, sketching from whatever I could conjure in my mind (I'm working harder at building my visual library these days, so trying to imagine a variety of designs prior to sketching is a big part of my process now, relying less and less on reference material while sketching) and then implemented some flowing cloak/rags that might work well within a composition.
The first torso design shows how I focused more on a symmetrical design, the middle shows an asymmetrical, and the third is a combination of the two. I was torn between which type of design would be more successful.
Also to note, in regards to the 80's influence, I thought I'd feature some beefy shoulder pads in the design to give a slight nod to the era.
Following on from the torso designs, I referred to my inspiration board to get a quick update on elements that were often featured in successful dark-fantasy designs. Kekai Kotaki is a big fan of getting as many spikes, ringlets and fangs/horns as possible on his evil characters, so I made note of this before moving onto the next sketch-fest.
I tried a few different things this time; tearing up the girl's face was first on my list of things to do. I wondered if I could merge a pretty girl with something horrific, that might benefit the dark side of her character and provide some kind of a backstory element, so I played around with exposing parts of her flesh and making spikes protrude from her. I also popped a couple of glyph (or glowing tattoo) designs on her, to see if that might help with the magic part of her character. Neither of these appealed to me, but I carried on implementing them into another torso sketch, just to make sure I gave it a chance.
The exposed flesh and spikes didn't appeal to me as I wanted her to remain pretty, without too much flaw. I felt that there should be another element that could convey her dark nature. In the torso sketch, the glowing green coming from her exposed ribcage is supposed to be some kind of a magic-infused soul spilling forth - a bit like a lich might have - but Kekai has already done that (as have many others) and he did it very well, so I wasn't keen on attempting my own spin on that.
I moved onto getting some leg armour designs down. By this point, I was confident that I would be presenting this character as a strong, sexy warrior with some magical elements most likely applied to her weaponry or armour. I focused on making the armour set more believable and appropriate for the D&D style of artwork, while considering ways that I might be able to evolve the design and add my own angle to it. Again, these sketches came from whatever floated through my mind at the time, with little or no reference used on the way.
Something that had been bothering me was the girl's hair and face from earlier. I wanted her to have slightly more of a generic young-fantasy-heroine look about her, that I could then muck about with to suit my own needs, so I tested out a few new hairdo's and gave her a younger, more pissed-off expression. This time it was the longer, asymmetrical hair style that was catching my eye. I kept that in consideration for the next stage.
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