Sugarplum Tea Party, pt. 1: redesigning old characters (Patreon)

Working on the splash art for Sugarplum Cafe - this will be the title art when my game is finally announced to the public!

This is an image I've had in mind as the vision for the game - just two elegant ladies having afternoon tea and desserts. In my head the illustration is super detailed and delicate, and it captures the visuals that I hope will make this game stand out.

Here's this week's progress. I started drawing the girls and realized I wanted to update their designs to capture the essence of their flavors better, so I took a redesigning detour.

Old design for reference:

The urge to redesign started with Lady Chocolate and how I had originally wanted her diagonal patterns to be inspired by chocolate bar squares, but I felt that the inspiration had been lost along the way. So I made her costume a little more literal but changed the cut of the dress to be a little more fashion forward.

I also wanted Lady Vanilla's lace to have more detail in the illustration. I was inspired by cake frosting for the details initially, but I'm not really sure if that came across. But on the other hand, I think going too literal would have started to make all the designs look costumey because it's one thing if Chocolate's squares are a literal but if every lady has literal stuff it's kind of a lot...if that makes sense?

Also decided to remove Mint's puffy sleeves and give them to Vanilla because they kind of look like frosting lol. (Mint also got a more angular silhouette for cohesion and I changed her bows to look more like mint leaves, but she won't be in this illustration.)

So here's where I'm currently at with Vanilla's lace (old and new comparison):

To be honest I'm still not satisfied with these details, but I like that they're softer at least. The shape ended up being more inspired by sandwich cookies than frosting, although I don't think that's obvious enough either. Maybe once I color everything in that will help...I like how the color thumbnail looks, at least.

These are definitely not final and I'll continue to work on their designs, but I'm satisfied enough to continue the illustration. It'll take multiple iterations before I settle on character designs I'm 100% happy with, so I'll still consider this progress :)

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To be honest, this is all very ambitious especially because I haven't drawn detailed backgrounds like this in *forever*, and I'm definitely struggling tbh, but I figure it has to get done at some point so I'm glad I'm finally starting on it after the image has been stuck in my head for so long! Hope you are all as excited to see this finished as I am.