jackssmirkingrevenge wrote:I have a hunch that you could do much better with the detail of the mechanical bits.
Easily, if I want to. I'm going frakking nuts for the Dark Magenta cover. That includes a tech-priest with tubes down his nose from the wrong direction. Don't try and work that one out.
However, with Silva, character design changes are more complex.
Firstly, I'm trying to keep some faithfulness to the original design. Basically, I want to try and keep wherever I take her design as recognisably (if not necessarily immediately so) the same character as I started with in July 2006.
Problem there is she was literally the second character I created after I took up art as a hobby, so her design was somewhat limited by my artistic vision and talents at the time.
Given she's gone from mid twenties, long hair and reasonably feminine build (by the standards of my drawing at the time) to forty, a bobcut and feasibly being able to overturn a medium sized pink elephant, about the only things that remain are the configuration (left arm, right leg) and patterning on her bionics.
So, while if I were designing the character from scratch now, I'd probably go pretty different on the bionics, there are things I don't want to lose in the evolution of the design.
I may look into a more intricate design for the bionics if I think I can keep the basic patterning in there somehow (and having just thought about it, I do have an idea or two), but...
... the second thing is I don't want to go too overcomplicated with the design of one of my main characters. I agree, there's room for more complexity, but definitely don't want to make drawing her feel like effort.
She became my preferred character because she was fun to draw and distinctive enough in design to be recognisable between drawings, so those are two things I absolutely refuse to lose from her design.
Yep, I think I can do better and I'd like to... but I've still got to be a bit picky about what I do with her character design.
Aside from anything else, it's in her contract. Along with the fact she has to dress up like an idiot for my birthday, but she's less happy about that part.