Updating an old character

Just a brief blog post, recently I've been studying off of YouTube videos to improve my art skills and expand my knowledge. With this studying I wanted to put it to practice and create another illustration of an old exercise post.

I created a superhero last year called Wendy, she was a nature elemental character who was self-assured and was designed with a story in mind.

Looking back, I wanted to change a few things such as her hair colour and changing her attire slightly to better reflect her naturalistic theme. As I decided on a pose I looked at changing the leaves of her shoulder pads and thought "Realistically, she won't be able to move with stiff iron leaves on her shoulder", so I changed them to simple leaves; while changing the one suit to stop at her ankle and little leaf shoes.

The previous design also had very lacking line work for a digital illustration and the the pose was a bit lacklustre, with watching art school videos I learnt about different techniques approaching line work and colour; while also brushing up and studying anatomy, doing sessions of online life drawing to make sure I crack down on the human anatomy.

Process

Outcome

Evaluation

The outcome was SO much better, I am so pleased to see how much I've improved, the pose is much better, the lighting is better. The character is more cohesive without that bold purple hair, and the costume makes more sense with the ability of movement. The illustration has more movement and the background makes more sense to the underlying character illustration (that she's flying and in action).

I especially love the lighting and the bounce shadow of the blue skin hitting the iron armour, it makes it very effective; the line park has improved slightly but I will work on that further. I'm not too sure what needs improving for next years redesign therefore I'm open to any feedback you may have.