Designing Valoria (Patreon)

Hey hey hey folks, I just wanted to give y'all some insight into my hilariously unprofessional "how to draw an owl" style character design process. This one is for Valoria, the paladin whom our protagonist skeleton has just encountered in My Life as a Skeleton.

So we start with me refreshing myself on how to draw [1] girls, and [2] anime-esque eyes, 2 things that I'm not very good at because I almost never do them... but hey, practice makes perfect!

I pull in some references of what I want her "vibe" to be like -- mainly what I was looking for was those inward slanted eyes that the likes of Haruko and Kamina have. I also knew I wanted her to have a hairclip, but something cool as opposed to cute. Also freckles, and a shirt collar. Ngl, I'm not real into this face here.  😔  But it's okay, I ended up changing it a lot.

A more simplified face, and a sketchy idea of what I want the body to look like. Her clothes are inspired by crusader knights and paladins, like the ones in WoW. Did you know the crusader knights just wore big wacky belts?

I guess I'm not too surprised, it's just interesting how modern the belts looked. Belt technology has not evolved much in the past 1000 years.

Finally we have a more detailed outfit, wings everywhere, big hair, sword blade hair clip, etc. This was drawn over the less detailed sketch of the body while referencing the face. I ended up making her side-hair-things a lot more prominent cuz I think they're cool.

That's the paladin Valoria, folks! I hope you enjoyed my explanation of how I bumbled through this.