More Character Design

I'm away from home, which means away from my Cintiq. It's funny, I've worked for years with my trusty Intuos 3 tablet, and now 3 months with a Cintiq ruins everything. Working with the Intuos feels like an incredible chore now, which is ridiculous and probably one of those first world problems you hear about.

I've been working on a female character in the same vein as my male design for Donovan down below. I wanted to do something fantasy, so I decided to do a mage, mostly because mage clothing in games always bothers me. Usually it's some sort of ridiculous robe, dress, gown or something. To me, even if you are a mage I'd still think in battle you'd want to move around. Just because you can shoot lightning out of your hand/staff/face doesn't mean agility isn't important when people are trying to murder you. Also, there's hardly any armor for mages. I know that you have magic, but there's nothing wrong with a little something between you and a sharp stick, right? I mean, this is battle we're talking about. Things like that have always gotten to me, so I decided to pursue some options.

Oh, also - it's a huge pet peeve of mine that women aren't fully clothed in games, so it should go without saying that we're going to do a clothed female character, not a cleavage babe in thigh highs. It will never cease to amaze me the things lady characters wear into battle. But I could talk about that for paragraphs, so let's just move along shall we?

My process for this was different than with Donovan because a mage by class tends to have his/her role a little more defined. I saw this as your sort of starting archetype female character for an MMO. If it was for a story I'd say that this is a practical, battle-hardened type of person - serious and seasoned. I dislike the archetype that mages need to be frail sensitive people that cringe on the outskirts of battle for fear of breaking a nail.

I did some costume concepts:

I'd like to do multiples in color like I did with Donovan, but I've had a lot of side projects on my plate lately. So for right now I picked one that I liked best, an amalgamation of a few designs, but primarily taken from the right image of the second set. I picked that design because I felt like it was practical, but the silhouette still read as a mage. What's more, even though there are drapey elements to the design, the outfit would allow for movement, while still theoretically still providing some protection.

I went for a bright blizzard style color scheme:

And then I added textures and scraped/scuffed it up so it looked like it wasn't fresh off the hangar at the Mage Surplus:

Voila! Job done. For now, at least.