About Refining and Designing a Character (Part 2)
Let's get back where we head off last time. This is where we were last time, before I've started talking about layering.
Let us see what has happened since then (roughly 2-3 hours). So what has happened since then? Let's have a look:
First, you will see that during the last phase yesterday, I spent my time with hair variations. But let's take a step back and look at the other things that has happened.
You can see that some time was invested in adding more color layering on the clothes, refining what we were talking about during the last blog entry. You can see (so far) that the balance of the 4 colors are roughly evened out and well-balanced. Now well noted, this isn't definite still, but we are certainly getting somewhere.
The Hair went through a longer process and ended up with a tied up ponytail which makes the whole head resemble a music note ( ♪ ), this is a good thing, since the character is inspired by parade musicians and that of a music conductor. Depending on how the hat is shaped on the back side, this concept can work well.
As you have properly noticed, this character will have a artificial/mechanical right arm(s), meaning that this model will be off-balanced in symmetry but that is fine, it gives us an opportunity in making the color balancing more interesting. For this first variation of the right arm, I will be going for a golden/black arm, this will be a great balancer due to the gold/yellow part on the sleeve of the left side of the character.
Maybe something like that. As you can see, the balancing isn't perfect, it is lacking green tones but at the same time it kind of works because it is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the limbs and stands out as something unusual, which makes sense since it's an artificial arm. Still a bit conflicted, it might look better with some green stripes maybe, but then again, you don't switch out your arm to suit your outfit, don't you. It's a design decision, important is that it matches the overall color scheme.
Next would be the boots, this is another opportunity to balance out the colors of the character overall, of course, the stockings could also be changed in terms of colors, maybe white if the boots turn out to look better with a heavy weight in green or black instead of white.
Of course, there's also this classic trick to zig zag colors to balance things out (like here changing one stocking to white to accommodate the arms which are also black and white). If that is the approach, then the foot wear is going to be dominant green (50%), with a bit of white black (each 20%) and gold (10%) to balance everything out again, that however, is yet to be discovered.
As you probably have already noticed, character design can be a very delicate thing, and if you want to make everything work out cleanly, it will take many iterations until every puzzle piece fits together. I'd say if one manages to make it 75% right, that they are on the good side, the remaining 25% is just a bonus.
Okay, after trying things out for awhile, this is the current solution. As you can see, the color distribution isn't perfect, since the boots are dominantly black/green, the right leg of the character became dominantly black, however, that isn't essentially a bad thing, since the right arm (this current version) is dominantly white. Speaking of that arm, as you can see, the complexity of that arm has increased too, this is to make it more credible in terms of functionality, as before it was just a golden orb, and that would be a bit of a weird mechanical prosthetic, since you'd have to fit a limb to a rotating ball joint... which makes no sense... the new solution wraps itself around the right shoulder, which leaves room to imagination, sure, but at least it "could work" now, visually at the very least.
I will spend the next couple of days working on finishing the coloring of the model, so the next time I come back, the base model probably has been illustrated and colored fully. There's still room for further details I could put on this model, not really happy on the collar either at this point, since it's just floating around, maybe I will do something about it... we shall see.