WIP: The Four Heroes

Greetings and salutations! Today I will show everyone some of the progress I have made with a project I have started for my school's portfolio show. At The Art Institute that I attend, graduates must participate in a Portfolio Show. Pretty much it is a minor convention of sorts for graduating students to show off their very best work in their portfolio. Students get their own booth and have the final say in the design of the booth. While I won't be graduating for about another year, it is always a good idea to get your best work ready early so that you can have awesome stuff for the show. My focus is on 3D character art and design so that's what my booth will focus on when I graduate.

For my booth, I will be reviving one of my old ideas I had several years ago before I came to The Art Institute. The project is called The Four Heroes and was inspired by an old magazine article on what type of characters the editors and readers would like to see if they made their own Final Fantasy type of game. I always liked Final Fantasy VII, but not so much the newer versions, particularly twelve which I felt was very uninspiring, bland, and had unnecessary characters (looking at you Vaan!). I remember reading somewhere that the original Final Fantasy had four warriors of light so I went ahead and designed four characters that I would probably use in an RPG. The result was this:

The original Four Heroes

I was happy with the result at the time but now it just looks plain terrible to me because I believe my art has improved substantially. However, I thought that making four new characters individually and then combining them into a new image in 3D would be perfect material for my portfolio. So I started coming up with ideas and today I will show off some of my preliminary work for the first character, Aphrael Red.

Aphrael's design was inspired from Shidou Hikaru of Magic Knight Rayearth and the red mages of Final Fantasy XI. I already had an idea what she was going to look like: a tall tomboyish woman wearing a red bolero jacket with a black ruffled mini-skirt, long strong legs and of course, short red hair. I started doing some quick thumbnail sketches of her doing different things to get a feel for the character:

As you can see, one of the things I was trying to get in these sketches is that she kind of moves with the gracefulness of a strong dancer such as a ballerina. Thus a lot of emphasis is on her legs to show her physical strength. The frilly outfit she wears is to help create a stronger contrast between the long lines of her legs and the more complex shapes of her upper body. In addition, I was also thinking of her personality like what kind of woman wears an outfit like this or why does she wear an outfit like this? I was thinking that even though she is kind of a tomboy, she is still quite girly or enjoys looking rather feminine so she favors ruffles, lace and ribbons. She is also quite flamboyant. Therefore her sleeves are flared for when she swings her arms in exaggerated movements so that you get large flowing shapes of red to draw attention to herself. Then as a nice little quirk, I gave her a small red beret as well because maybe she likes small quirky hats.

Her facial features were originally based off of Audrey Hepburn (who in my opinion was probably the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, period). I then tweaked my sketch around to give her a little bit more individuality as well as giving her the cliched beauty mark. Aphrael is supposed to have freckles but I thought it would be interesting to combine freckles with a beauty mark. I also did a color sketch with emphasis on her skin tone so I can get an idea of how to paint her textures later as shown below:

A color sketch of Aphrael

I wanted Aphrael to have red hair, but I am not too satisfied with the more orange tone to her hair and eyes that she currently has even though it is more natural. I am considering taming her messy hair just a bit and making it more coppery red to a berry red to match her jacket. Her eyes I was also thinking of making them darker as well.

Now while I was thinking about her hair and hair color, I also drew up a quick silhouette because I wanted to determine if a frilly skirt would really be the right choice for her design. I showed the following concepts to some of my classmates and instructors to get some feedback.

Character silhouettes of Aphrael

I was playing around with the concept of her not wearing a skirt and instead just having a bodysuit instead. However, as I had suspected, from the feedback that I had gotten, giving her the ruffled skirt and the bolero jacket would be a better and more interesting design choice.

Now that I had confirmation on which design would be better, I went ahead made a more detailed sketch of Aphrael; first her physique and then her clothes. I might want to warn those who have more delicate eyes that there is very mild nudity in the first image.

 

In art, especially figure drawing, it is better to draw the figure beneath the clothes first so that way you know what the forms and solids of the clothes are going to look like when you get to the clothing stage of the concept. I also drew Aphrael nude first because I wanted to make sure she had the physique that I wanted her to have. Special attention was given to her legs and I had to rely on some reference to make sure the musculature and the mass of her legs were correct. I wanted her to have big thighs, but not so big that they resembled speed skaters. I also wanted her to have dancers' legs, but not the skinny type but the strong, shapely type with nice, flowing curves.

Since her legs were going to be a signature part of her design, I felt it prudent that the hose or whatever material it was going to be have at least a vertical seam in front so that the viewer's eyes are guided along the shape of her legs in whatever pose she will be in within the final image. There is supposed to be a futuristic-like feel to her design as well, so I combined her shoes into the leg material for a more seamless line to follow and made her bolero more geometric. In the end, the design has three major elements: the long sweeping lines of her legs, the curvy and frilly shapes of her skirt, and the sharp geometric designs of her jacket. I think these contrasting themes in her outfit bring a unique harmony to the outfit as a whole and give Aphrael a feminine charm that I think is quite cute and sexy. While I disagree with how many female characters and their designs in the industry are nothing more than sex objects, I don't see anything wrong with adding a little sex appeal to a character as long as it's in reason and realistic. You don't have to design a woman practically naked to make her sexy and attractive. The same goes for male character designs even though in their case the designs are usually more like male power fantasies than the more slender but ripped swimmer physiques that are more preferred by women. I think many western character designers and game developers could learn a thing or two from Japanese and Korean character design for their male characters. There's a reason many of their games have a large female following.

Now that I have solidified the outfit for Aphrael, there is one more thing missing: a prop. As you can see in the silhouettes, I planned on having Aphrael using a slender sword of some type. I am also considering adding a secondary prop like a firearm or two. In my next post, I will cover the design process of creating Aphrael's weapons that she uses to fight her enemies so stay tuned!