Week 11/ Industry Week - Vampire Knight Development

 Ironically I chose to do the vampire knight prompt as I thought it would be the easiest/ quickest for me to design, as I draw a lot of this type of stuff anyways. It's taking a bit longer than I expected, but I've made a breakthrough with the design:

It's only a rough sketch for now, but I've decided to give him a fencing cape and a pauldron on opposite shoulders - the main struggle of this design was basically I desperately wanted to give him cool armour, but I also needed to give him the mysterious and dramatic vampire cloak. It took me a while but this solution is quite simple yet effective. I thought of characters like Meta Knight (HAL Laboratory 1993) and Asgore (Toby Fox 2015) who both have cloaks and armour, especially Meta Knight as he has a slight gothic knight theme to him (albeit a very cutesy stylised Kirby version of a gothic knight) with his dark colour scheme and bat-like wings (the cloak and wings are interchangable/ he seems to switch between the two). A lot of knights do have capes or cloaks, but long capes don't quite have the same dramatic flair as cloaks do, but in order to function and flow properly a cloak would have to be draped over the pauldrons/ armour, so for this design the asymmetry works best.

 

Before getting to this point I did a couple more sketches and some poses to try and generate ideas for the cloak problem:

 

 

First I finished the full armour design, making it as functional/ realistic as possible in terms of structure. I'm happy with how it turned out, and I'm tempted to forgo the more sleek classic vampire-like design and go with this more bulky one, but without the helmet, and maybe also redesigning the breastplate. 

 

Below I've taken away varying parts of the armour to add more fabric elements and to show his face - as well as the cloak I wanted to incoorperate some parts more similar to noble clothing (again for the vampire aesthetic, but also to simplify the knight design).

 

 I did a few pose sketches as well to try and get a feel for the movement and shapes of the cloak and to see if I could design the armour around it:

This last one I did without a reference, I drew this once I'd had the idea for the asymmetry, you can see the same sketch with all the gear drawn over it underneath. I kept this here by itself as I wanted to include it in my 2D toolkit studies, in this and all the rest of the sketches I think I understand drawing in the ribcage better to help with the underlying structure. There's more hands here too, making the hands count somewhere between 50-55 (I've sort of lost count so this is just an educated guess).

 

This last sketch features a design most similar to the one at the top of this post; I drew this pose right before that one, to illustrate the fencing cape idea. I also made the design more slender, typical of most vampire designs. I might go back to the more muscular initial design though. 

 

Whatever it ends up being, I think I need to hurry up and at least make the base mesh for once I've got the design sorted out.