The two features I knew I wanted for Mio when I started to think about visuals was: dark skinned and androgynous. And because I was especially unsure how I wanted that last one to turn out i started to look around for references online and found this piece by someone far more talented that I am:
That was the direction I wanted to go in so I started with a sketch in the same pose, heavily referencing and then working out some differences I wanted to have in there:
One of the first things I knew I wanted to change was the hair, mainly in the sense that I was looking for actual volume. That lead to the second change pretty much immidiately which was to make almost everything a little rounder, softer, pushed just slightly more to the feminine side of things. I looked around for some ideas for clothing then and ended on some gravity defying fantasy style poofy pants and a wrap top, which makes a nice modular clothing setup for a practically oriented character. Add some scars and voila…
Mio wears no armour and that is unlikely to change even though it would probably benefit them mechanically.
After this first Design attempt I also ended up changing the nose shape into something a little more distinct, but for this one this is how things stayed when I moved on to colors:
I found that what I fits had there was to close to the reference though and eventually landed on a result that I got when adding a certain opacity of multiply and burn layer of the same colour on top of it. And because I was chatting with people while drawing I also got tempted t give them a tattoo with a very cryptic meaning behind it.
Lastly, it wasn’t yet official what kind of climate we would be starting in with these characters so I got thinking how I might get a warmer version of this outfit to work and ended up with a wool cloak that can double as a belt.
So this was Mio design iteration one… After that it was time to get this away from the reference and make it my own which is when this picture came to be:
It solidified some of the distinctions I wanted Mio to have and helped me to break loose from the similarities in general.
I also have a prober character sheet for them planned out, but have so far not gotten around to tackling that.
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