Character Style

My main inspiration for character style is the character designs from the game Cris Tales who were designed by Sebastian Villarreal. I have looked into his Instagram page and it seems he is heavily influenced by Studio Ghibli. I have tried to contact Sebastian Villarreal, but no reply as of yet.

Body Type

For the body type, I wanted to go for something feminine, slender and athletic looking. For this I took an influence from the character designs of ‘LoliRock’ as I felt that that style would be a really good starting point. At the same time I got started thinking of the character’s background details, her personality and the like.

Clothing Ideas

After getting the body I went straight into clothing ideas. Thanks to tracing paper (so useful) I was able to create outfits without having to draw out the body shape multiple times. Below are some images that I used for reference in creating some outfits. (Other references for outfits are at the hairstyles section).

The outfit that will work best is the one that suits a hunter village girl. Therefore not to frilly or loose and something that would be easy to move in.

After looking at these eight outfits, the ones that suit the character most would be 3, 5 and 6.  3 has the most hunter style look to it and still has a feminine flair to it. 5  is a close second. 6 is a bit loose but the added fur elements really help the hunter village style I’m looking for.

Hairstyles and Eyes

Next up is hairstyles for the character. I don’t want to go for short hair but a short wild look could work. So I looked up some hunter type designs and went from there.

The first row of styles are long loose styles. 4 really works for a wild princess character. However well researching hunter characters I noticed that most of the designs sport the hair in a braid. Therefore I used the bottom row to work on different way to show a braid. Option 8 is my favourite design, reference taken from the character Petra from ‘Fire Emblem: Three Houses’, who happens to be a hunter.

I also practiced some eye styles and nose styles that I think would suit best with the overall character design. I also decided to jazz up the hairstyle a bit. I thought it was too plain and needed to be more stylized. And I really like it.

After creating the new stylized hair, I realised that I need to stylize the entire character. What I had was too like what I usually do and I wanted to work on a style different that my usual one. And I have to say, I love the look, it looks perfect. I am proud of it.

My tutor advised me to put the finished character into different poses to get a good feel for the overall character design. I worked up four poses which I really like and then did something I thought important. For this character the colour red is an important theme and in my head going to be a main focus, especially in the hair. So with tracing paper I used a red sharpe to mark out where I was going to put the red in the hair. The character has four big strand looping in the back and decided to test out which one would be red to give a unique look to the character.

Below is the finished digital result. And I am in love with it. I honestly can’t believe what I created. The hair is fabulous and the outfit it looking awesome. For the outfit I used natural forest colours so fit the theme of hunter. A bit of advise that was given was that initally, the characters shoes had quite the heel on them. My tutor said that it is quite impractical for her line of work. I looked at the character and agreed, shortening the heel but still wanting it to remain boot like. The boot also has white fur. This is an important element as she comes from a wolf village so I thought adding some fur would be a good detail to add in.

 

 

I am really proud of this character. I know I should do some different colour versions of the character but I think I really landed it first time. Of course there was little debates with myself on the shades of colours but I think the overall look really suits the character I wanted to put forth.