Here I have applied various different patterns and colour schemes to last week's chosen thumbnail designs. While doing this I tried to avoid using oversaturated colours in order to keep the Diplomat's uniform sensible looking, but at the same time I tried to vary up the palette as much as possible. Once again, I think the erratic patterns on the top-right images invoke images of war paint too strongly, and so I will not be using them. I think quite a few of these work very well, not just the ones I have highlighted. The fourth design on the bottom row is a good example of this, as I really like the way that the teal and gold work off each other, I'm not sure that these are convincing colours for items of clothing that are meant to be partially made of metal. As you can see, this thought definitely swayed my choice for which colour schemes to pick overall, as both possess an overall greyish look, with only small accents applied here and there. I think darker colours work better for what I am trying to achieve with the character, and the red items of clothing make a good accompaniment.
Next is our Diplomat's face. Since I found the male thumbnail designs worked best, I went on the search for middle-aged male faces that give off a sense of seriousness and authority. By mixing such faces with others, as well as liquifying them in photoshop, I created a set of bases to paint-over and alter into the desired appearance. As you can see, not all of them were successful, with the second design on the bottom row appearing almost comical with his upper-lip fluff. When choosing the best face to use, I considered which were the easiest to take seriously, and decided on the top row. I eventually came to the conclusion of using faces 1 or 2, as I wanted the character to have a worldly, rich culture implied, and the darker skin and facial tattoos worked well with this.
I then made the decision to mix the first 2 faces into a single design, resulting in the above image. The head retains the stronger and slimmer jawline of the second design, while using the tattoos from the first design. On the right we can see how I altered this image further in order to make it easier to read from longer distances. I did this by using the mixer brush in Photoshop and smoothing over all of the painterly marks, creating a slightly simpler airbrushed finish for use with creating the full body designs.
Before going straight into working on the full body, I thought it may be useful to familiarise myself with it first. I imagined that the Diplomat would probably be wearing some sort of skintight bodysuit under his ceremonial armour, and therefor elected to draw up some examples of the muscle groups within the male torso in order to help visualise this bodysuit when the time came.
Above you can see sequential images of the lone bodysuit, a rejected concept for the diplomat, the revised one, and an orthographic map of his features. In regards to the "rejected" design, I was unhappy upon completing it. It's a little boring, there's too much of the under suit visible and a lot of the armour pieces just don't click. Also I didn't think that the choice of clothing made it clear that he was supposed to be a political figure. The shading simply wasn't convincing in some areas, and the armour seems to be just held on by either magic or super glue. For what was intended to be a "realistic" design, the golds were far too saturated and yellow to convey the real life material. That said, you can see that I kept elements of this design for the revised version, which ended up being a much stronger representation of what I was going for. The colour scheme is more sensible, and the clothing has recessed back to a more practical form of wear.
The rest of this week has been spent on creating the other 2 levels of stylisation for the character. Here's a lineup for comparison - I've included headshots so you can get a better view of the details in the facial area. If I had to pick a favourite I'd probably go for the middle one, as I'm really pleased with how I turned the face into the Overwatch style, walking the line quite well while still maintaining a strong resemblance to the original realistic design. Overall, I'm happy with all 3 of these designs but I'm sure there's still room for improvement later on.