Alright, as promised I actually am including pics here instead of just flapping my jaw like I usually do. I was at home sick today (I just love the little super bugs that come with school kids), so I had some free time I guess you could say.
Over the years as I’ve started concepting my own characters — not all of them Star Wars, surprise-surprise — I’ve developed my own little process. I’ll go through lots of different sketches figuring out their base look or style, and then usually scan that in (I draw a lot better with pencil & paper than I do on the Wacom tablet) and setup a base image to color. So this is exactly what I did with Kaiyra, which was especially hard for me as I’ve gotten away from my own stylized look for soooo long now (studying realism & anatomy) that it was freaking hard to do things out of proportion/cartoony. Anyhow, the sketch:
Once I was finally satisfied with this particular sketch I scanned it in — the hardest part for me was getting a waist-torso-chest ratio I was okay with. I’ve since changed it up a little bit more while building her 3d model (but that’s for another post on another night).
With the sketch I then “ink” it in using Photoshop, setting up clean lines I use to basically color with. I make some generic shading that can be applied on any color under it, I set each piece of the outfit onto it’s own layer in Photoshop and then basically I use colorize to change that layer’s color to whatever I want, mixing and matching. A really great site for picking color palettes to reference is Adobe’s Kuler website, which lets you choose from color palettes other people have made or constructing your own with several different color matching theories to choose from. So, then I just go to coloring until I run out of ideas (or find one I like):
About halfway through her sketches I found I was paying too much attention/taking too long on the gorram helmet instead of her outfit and the colors, so I turned the helmet layer off so I could focus just on the outfit’s elements. I like to take my time doing these, stretching it out over a few days so I can effectively walk away from the computer and come back the next day with fresh eyes. Sometimes and idea I thought poor looks better when I’m not as self-critical, though more often than that one I thought was good has fallen apart over the break.
Such was actually the case with a few of the costume details on Kaiyra, surprisingly — after these and finding the colors I liked, I found I wanted to ditch her kama altogether (the skirt like bit on her), and go for more of a cape. Method behind the madness here was hoping to make animation a little easier (a kama is a pain-in-the-ass to animate compared to a cape) and I didn’t want her to have a jetpack like most Mandalorians do (Boba Fett, Jango Fett, just about every other one out there). So, revising some of the color placement and details, I came up with the final look:
That all done, I then made a details reference sheet using a lot of the photos I found amongst the interwebs for her costume. The point of references — at least with how I use them for my own stuff — is for two things…the detail reference (obviously), and the practicality. Star Wars especially (in the original trilogy) was big on using practical objects readily available and to better reflect that I tried doing the same for most of her costume.
And…there she is. She’s ending up slightly taller/longer legged in the 3d model, but for the most part I’ll be going directly off of this reference sheet I made for myself and hoping it comes out well.
Time for bed…g’night!
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