Final Designs Plans + Colour

After drawing countless dresses for my main character I have finally come up with her ten different looks, although I'll need to experiment with colour on a few of them, i am pretty pleased with how they already look.

I was happy with all of these dresses apart from the first one which faded into the background compared to the other dresses. I realised this was because it didn't have any stand out features to it and so i redesigned it.

I think this dress stand out more than the previous one and looks better too, I realise it is only in rough though so expect digital designs soon.

I'm going to choose three to four designs and take them through to Corel Painter to spruce them up a bit. I haven't decided exactly which four or so designs i want to do this with yet, but i have picked one, the nautical sailor dress with the deadly anchor. Here is a sketch of her outfit/ weapon/ hair clip.

After a few play arounds in painter i created a mock up of what colours would be used on her. Although i may still change a couple of things with her, i am fairly happy with how the plan turned out, i think it really brings that nautical feel to the dress and since it will be worn in a sea themed level, it has achieved its goal.

I decided to then use this design in a rough plan for what my finished pieces will look like.

I am very happy with this plan, i think in the finished pieces it will all come together to deliver a show of various dresses that will be easily recognisable and easy to place if the environmental hint behind the dress does its job. I am particularly fond of the watercolour effect i used with the help of Corel Painter. I think i will use this effect on the finished pieces as looks really natural.

Eager to see what the other dresses would look like in colour, i decided to have a go at them quickly and i really like how the colours from my mind are suddenly in the design, so everyone can see the colours of these dresses i pictured in my head when i designed them.

The ice-cream dress on the far right on the first image, which had been fairly un-noticed up until this colouring point suddenly became more popular with people when i asked them their opinions on it, this was the same with the tulip coloured tulip dress second from the left. However, the top middle dress - supposedly representing the 70s was criticised for not being 70s enough, which is something i will have to work on.

Another dress i wanted a second opinion on was the woolly coat dress worn in the ice zone. I wasn't sure on colours so i drew six variations and asked people which their favourite was. I had personally always imagined the coat to be pink and brown, the design second from the right.

After asking a couple of my friends it was clear that no-one particularly liked the red, green or black dress - all being too stereotypically christmasy . The yellow dress was well received but the blue and pink dress proved to be the favourites. This reassured me to go with my gut and pick the pink one, however, i will keep the blue one in mind if i decided against the pink.

A few other plans i have been working on are the style of the weapons, i wanted them to all have something that made them special, so a sword isn't just a sword, it may have something quirky about it. Then my friend noticed that the battle axe looked a little bit like a broken heart and so i decided to play around with the idea and here are my results with the axe.

I am happy with these designs and will be using the one which the character is holding. It looks like a broken heart which is perfect for this game, if i can give the other weapons something quirky like this it would be a nice  detail to have.

Lastly, i have been working on a way to hint about the environment the dress would be in so the viewer can get some sort of idea of where the dress would be and how it would fit in with the surroundings. I solution is came up with is a circle with an inner circle, with a basic picture inside that will hopefully give an idea of the environment, for example, the sea level would have a wave in a circle, this is viewable in the rough plan a few pictures up. Here are the environmental seals I designed for each environment.

I think these will work well to give an idea of the environment as they are simple yet effective. Some need some tweaking, for example i think the time seal looks too simple and boring and the swamp and jungle seals look too similar. However, i am very pleased with this idea and hopefully it will work out well.