Expression Sheet - 30/07/15

Where has the week gone.
Updating daily could be considered a very broad stretch.

However, there's now some expressions.

Turnaround - 27/07/15

It may have passed midnight, but I completed the work on the 27th, so it still counts. (it just takes a lot of effort to try and upload these images).

I picked my favourite out of the colour trials, and made and completed a turnaround for this character - which I really should give a name, lest I just continue to refer to her as 'her'.

 I also completed the design for the sword.

And for scale: 

The sword's slightly bigger than she is. Who knows how she carries it.

As for texturing, I'm not going for a lot. A cotton texture for the dress, and an iron one for the sword, at the moment, really.

Visual Development - 27/07/15

I've finally settled on a design, and worked a fair bit with colour today.

I ran a series of trials, initially of both hair, skin, and eye colour, along with her dress colours. (the formatting is terrible because I hate how this site arranges images.)

Once I'd settled on a set of colours for the character's skin and physical features, I began to look at different ideas as to the actual dresses' colour.

As was my original idea, a blue and black colour scheme was always heavily in mind when designing the character to start, and even amongst the other ideas I trialed, those were the shades I kept coming back to. Hence, I then trailed variations in those.

Visual Development - 23/07/15

I keep procrastinating on actually uploading the work I've been doing to here. "I'll do that tomorrow". Oops.

However, over the week, I've trialed a lot of variations in design for my character.
I played around with several different periods of dress.

The style of dress I selected to further develop is the one on the left.

Once I picked the time period and style I wanted, I began to further refine and trial the details.

Shoes

Corsets

Sleeves

I then moved on to weapon/prop design for the giant sword I wanted the girl to wield. 

I went through a lot of variations of different hilts, blades and pommels, looking at many different styles of sword. Thin blades, such as rapiers were scrapped, as I really wanted to build contrast between this thin, tiny girl, and this huge sword that should seem improbable for her to use. The more intricate hilt designs were also quickly scrapped, as in all practicality, for a two handed sword, less is better.

The final (ish) concept.

I wound up working a lot off broadswords, and exaggerating the features. I also got hooked on the idea of some form of floating orb or gem in the blade.

I then moved onto facial tests - I've decided I want the girl to look 'pretty' - again, a contrast between her and the oversized weapon.
Building the story around her, I've come to the conclusion that she spends her time luring princes in to rescue her, waiting patiently in her tower, only to fight and capture them. As to why? Who knows.

Next I plan to continue with the facial structures, and then move onto hair styles. I'd originally been planning to give her short hair, but as the story has developed, I've come to quite like the idea of her having it tied up - with the cord on which the key to her tower hangs? It's an idea for now.

Visual Development - 17/07/15

I continued work on the overall body design today. Out of the series of quick sketches I did earlier, I've decided to give the girl a very skinny, lanky body - to add some more emphasis on the contrast between her, and the huge sword I want her to wield.

I did a page of sketches of this body in motion - working out how the character moves and behaves, before going into details. So far, she's picked up a very athletic, agile motion - a lot of running, jumping and climbing, inspired by a mixture of parkour and free running, and games like Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge.

Visual Development - 16/07/15

Today I began work on body shapes for the character I want to design. I'm rather set in my base idea - which is to take inspiration from the Scarface 'Say hello to my little friend' scene, and have a girl wielding a large (oversized) sword.

I mostly played around with body shapes, so I can get the rough figure and motion down before I begin to work on hair, clothing, etc.