Crimson Rouge is back in action!

Ah the holidays, nice to have some time free to do some of my own stuff, there are quite a things I wanted to work on over the break. First thing is to redo one of my odd characters from years ago: Crimson Rouge, a samurai character from the 1940s.

The character as I imagined her back then was some girl that ended up getting trained with a group of mercenaries in martial arts, with her energies focused on speed and the samurai arts. Without going into backstory stuff that is.

First here is an old design from early college;
back when I had no idea how to design clothes, characters or perhaps most obvious here,their faces:

Old piece, please don't judge me.

My goal in this little project is to create a new version that doesn't fixate on this old design but follows my original idea while using all the iteration techniques we have learnt here at DMU. Hopefully I can come up with something a lot cooler and maybe a bit less... rubbish.

I started on some things all the way back last year where I would randomly add cool things to a pinterest board for her, from things such as 40s style coats and jackets, RAF pilot gear, kimonos and samurai armour and weapons. So just before we made a proper start on the sentry turret project a couple of months ago I made work on creating a proper moodboard and doing some random thumbnails and things.

Quite untidy, but with these moodboards I usually move things as I go start to develop the concepts, treating the photoshop document like a pile of loose images to draw connections between.

Ok now for some concept-y things, starting with some thumbnails, then followed by a bit of photobashing:

And here is a really basic colour drop, with some vibrance applied. Take about 5 minutes so nothing special, this is just used as a point of reference going forward for some sort of general colour scheme.