The Smiling Samuria (With Process) !

Here are the steps and what went through my mind while creating the character design sheet. For the whole process, you can go to this link right here! https://media.giphy.com/media/YbmZxqEWi3nEu94JDr/giphy.gif 

Step 1: I don't ever show these usually but this time I thought what the heck why the hell not! So for step 1, I did extremely rough sketches, these took 5 mins or less but I wanted to capture the overall pose and gesture - meaning if I was to zoom out, will the pose still read clearly and effectively.

Step 2! - This is the fun part, where I do the in detail research on what my character is going to wear based on her story background. A quick summary of her story is - Originally from the cold tundra area country (Viking based), she has been chosen from her tribe to train on the special Island called Wo - The land of the samurai, where she can hone her skills and bring glory to her people! - To get a better idea of what I wanted, I read many articles and websites with information about the history of the kimono and Viking's gear!

Step 3 - I have a rough idea of what she is wearing, but not for how it will look combined together for the final idea. So this stage is about ideation, iterations, readable silhouette, and playing with the character's main bold shape that she is based upon- the circle ( as I want her to feel kind, soft, and welcoming - even if she is not that at all!) 

Step 4: I am now playing with the colour of her outfit (on and off) and seeing what will read from a distance. I also started to explore the symbols she is wearing (heavily based on Viking nordic symbols) to show some story of her original heritage.

Step 5: Now we are getting to the parts which are self-explanatory - the rendering stage! Before I started rendering  I created the final layout design for the Character Sheet.

Step 6,7 and 8: Render, render and render! These steps don't need a lot of explaining other than I had to do some anatomy changes and studies throughout as I noticed it wasn't quite right throughout (Still could do some work but that's for the next one!) and I had to try to keep the rendering consistent through out, or one of them would stick out like a sick old ladies thumb!

Step 9: I then thought to myself it would be really cool if we could show her sword by its self when it's out of the sheath, also that if a 3d modeler wanted to create this, it should be very helpful for them.  This leads to me creating some iterations sketches of different designs for her sword. 

Step 10 - The Finale: Well I didn't have enough space to show the rendering of the sword but I think you got the gist of the idea! I enjoyed doing this a lot and plan to create a whole universe of characters, stories, and worlds just like her.

Thanks for getting this far and I hope you could learn, or get some ideas, or just enjoyed reading my process!