2nd Year project - Empress Nycra

Hello! This is this first post on this blog as I wanted to start afresh! I decided to only put the work up that I was particularity happy with and the only piece from 2nd year was a character I created for a Narrative project called Empress Nycra. I would put up her background and so forth up but she's a little complicated and I think maybe there's would be too much for this post :P. She's basically a terrible, warmonger, greedy Empress but there is more story behind her I swear! Anyway I made some research before I made her mostly on deviantart and I found some inspiring images that I made a collage of.

  These ones in particular I loved the styles of. I decided early on that I wanted her to be influenced by Asian type clothing so I began there. My favourite one is the biggest one in the center of the top page and from this image I decided I wanted my character to be the same, as a shameless, beautiful empress that did everything in her power to get what she wanted. Blackmailing, seducing or killing, she'd do them all to get her ahead. I wanted her to have an elaborate headdress and a beautiful long sweeping dress but in the end I didn't have the time to design this side of her since I wanted to create an armoured version more.

 For the hair I wanted something unusual that would mean she'd stand out from common folk but from an armour perspective wouldn't get in the way of battle. I wanted her to still look feminine but also bad ass as well. I liked several of the designs but my favourite was the top photograph with the plats.

 For the amour designs I found loads of images I loved and I wanted to some how incorporate several into one awesome design. I especially love the designs from Diablo 3 and Dragon age on the above page.

 I wanted to create a female protagonist that was strong and mysterious but interesting. The character above are Nariko from heavenly sword, Chell from Portal and Portal 2, San from Princess Mononoke, Female Shepard from Mass effect 3, Chloe and Elena from the Uncharted series and last but not least Faith from mirrors edge. All of these females have a strong presence of 'I can take care of myself' and this is the kind of female I wanted to create.

And last of all I looked at masks and horns to give my character. I wanted her to look creepy but I also wanted to work a mask into her helmet to be intimidating. One of my favourites in the woman with white hair that has horns made out of her hair.

Thanks for reading, I'll add some designs up as soon as possible :).