When starting out, I knew I wanted the character to have some sort of a mask that obscured most of her face, save for the nose and eyes. I also wanted her dress to be short and flowy. I played around with some dress types and decided that a lose, non-form fitting dress worked best. I also played around with some sleeve designs and went with a design that I used a lot when I was younger, loose around most of the arm, but tight or tied just above the elbow, as seen in the middle two designs.
Next I worked on the face. Looking back on it, a lot of time was wasted on this step as most of her face is obscured by the mask. Regardless, I really wanted her to have some dark face paint on her face to make her eyes pop.
At this point, it was becoming clear that there was just too much going on in the upper part of the character; the mask, the hair, the face paint, everything. The face wasn't that important since you only see about one third of it, so I ditched what was making it look too messy; the hair and the face paint. Not only was dark face paint making her upper half too busy, it was also making her look a lot like a weird Black Swan.
I started trying to play around with mask designs since you'd see it more than the face, but became impatient and started painting.
In the end, she ended up having a very Chozo-ish looking helmet/mask, but...I'm okay with that. I would like to simplify her mask a little bit more and make it to look like she's peering out of a mouth; right now she's got the two layers of turtle necks that look more like they're making it hard to breathe rather than a bottom set of teeth. She still seems a little top heavy, so I suppose I could do something with her feet/ legwarmer boots.Hopefully I'll have time to model her and the environment she lives in, but that shall be saved for another day.
