Concept Art: Circe (Patreon)

Circe is a witch for a project I've been working as art lead on for the past 8-ish months. She's one of two player avatars and has been banished to a land stuck in eternity. Circe's concept is that of a dark academia witch. The director wanted to evoke Fire Emblem in the style, which gave a unique challenge to the design. For this project, my role was to interpret the director's vision as best I could (hence the many iterations) with him providing feedback and giving the final say.

Step 1: Brainstorming and Thumbnails

Prior to putting pen to digital paper, I searched various dark academia aesthetics, witch vibes, and also constellations (to provide a fun locus for shape design). Each character for this game has an iconic item - Circe's is her witch's hat. I figured since she was intended to be both ambitious to a fault, I wanted to emphasize sharp angles. Of the designs, I really fought to have a sick jacket added to break up her silhouette, but unfortunately it got rejected ;_;

Step 2: Greyscale Sketches

From the broader silhouette thumbnails, I created a series of outfit sketches. I based a lot of the naming and ideas on occupation/situation to help inform the direction. After review from the director, we finalized the sketches with the final three at the bottom of the image. Ultimately we went with a hybrid of all three.

Step 3: Color Palettes

A couple of key points of Circe's color design were her pink hair and dark dress. The game environment itself is fairly dark, so I wanted to create a fair amount of contrast between the two values while still keeping within a fairly narrow range of hues. 

Step 4: Style Paradigm

The Circe concepts also had a second purpose - to provide a space to test out different anime aesthetics. Since true anime-style is outside of my wheelhouse, I had to pull from different references to try and create the face. 

But once it was all said and done, we ended up with Circe! The whole process probably took close to 20-25 hours, which is a bit beyond what I typically have to put into a piece, but it did give a fair amount of information about where we wanted the next character styles to go as well.