Space Girl Design Exploration (Patreon)

I've been revisiting this design since I thought about including her in my smash game concept and I have a handful of drawings I can share from over the years. She still doesn't have a name but I think I have a fun idea for her story that can be its own short comic! I wish I had more world visdev for her instead of basic poses but it's all in my sketchbook and its mostly bad so you don't get to see those (lol). The images above are sort of in reverse chronological order and since I'm thinking of her in a fighting game context, I've included several alt colors that would be cool if you could choose from when you play as her. then we have a passing design and the original design from 2017 that I just tossed out for fun at the time. She's changed a lot and at the same time not so much.

Basically, this girl pilots a small space food truck that doubles as her home and floats about space collecting exotic fruits across the galaxy, selling all sorts of treats like agua frescas, smoothies, and maybe even ice creams? She lives a deceptively simple life running her popular food truck that gets visitors at whatever part of the galaxy she stops in when she posts her location on social media. Her arms that are hidden in her suit tell of a sad past that holds an incident that took her arms away, having to get prosthetics to replace them. Whatever her past was, she was a bit of a fighter and as such her new arms give her immense strength to defend herself. Despite this, she doesn't want to live that type of life anymore, keeping it a secret from everyone and just trying to live a simple, happy life.

Her current design came about from a handful of things! The only one that was a conscious effort was this really cool bodysuit from one of Beyonce's adidas collabs. 

I thought it looked SO good and it was an incredible solution to my issue of trying to create a fun silhouette to push some emphasis on her extremities and exaggerate her height. The emphasis on the arms was covered by the big puffy sleeves (which I might push more as I draw her more) so I knew from there I wanted her to have some heft in her shoes at the bottom by her toes to add a lot of weight to the ends. She ended up with these almost ballerina-esque proportions that I'm really happy with. Her design reminds me of Kula Diamond for one reason or another which maybe slipped in while I was learning to play King of Fighters recently. Kula is cool as hell so I'm ok with how it ended up.

I'd also say that in an effort to make her different from most of my ladies, I went for a shorter hair approach, which at first was giving me some BOTW2 Zelda vibes! Mariel did a pass on her that lead to her current rounder hair and the circle clips, I'm really into the simpler shape.

And a consistent part of her design was trying to do my own version of Star Fox since Fox and Falco are such a prevalent part of Melee. I wanted her to be my own take on that aesthetic. The Star Fox crew all have metal legs and I flipped it and gave her metal arms instead, but I ended up borrowing the flight jacket feel even from the very first drawing years ago. Her arms have a similar structure to how Fox's legs work to mimic a real arm's organic shape with a bit more bumpiness and I'm pretty happy with the look!

Not as tied to the aesthetics of her design but a big inspiration for this current story is Pikmin! I love the collecting of the fruit and the larger than life size of everything. It has a vibe that I want to chase for this story as I develop it more. My other design inspiration as I build out how the rest of the world is Masaaki Yuasa's art, specifically Kaiba which has this incredibly fun cartoony and blobby feel to it. His art is full of so many fun rough shapes!

I'll try to practice drawing in this style and maybe Space Girl will start to get these more cartoony proportions, but here's everything I have so far! Other than that, it's just been Weekend With Yuka thumbnailing and working on some 3d models (maybe as I get better I'll start sharing more of that).

I really enjoy talking about designing characters so this post is a freebie so everyone can see where my mind is at! Patrons get access to a lot more WIPs, and I've got a few Red Muscle scribbles to post soon which include some NSFW things. Hope you like the stuff I post and I'll try to get some more things for you all soon.