Alright, so I took a 3 week break from this project and I've got some criticism from an ex-teacher, and he basically told me that my intent wasn't clear enough. It is true, I kind of went off-road and because I liked what I had made I settled for it. So I made a design brief with my intentions and here they are:
-creepy causasian girl mixed with a whip spider
-late teens/young adult (17 to 19 years old approximately)
-was made a living weapon by evil cultists who devote themselves to a spider god or something, so she has pieces of armor attached to her against her will (straps and nails going through her skin)
-medium armor, metallic parts + lots of leather, all of the body covered except for the head and the ''mutant'' parts.
As you can see, instead of inspiring myself from various arachnids, i'm going to take only the whip spider as a reference. My first intention was to make the character very young and I kind of lost that in my second iteration. I also really want her to feel like she's dangerous and even though she doesn't have a massive plate armor, she still has protection on most of her body. At first I wanted her to wear leather armor but ended up liking chain mail and leather straps better. I also gave her a name! She's Aryana. I thought it sounded cool and medieval, so here we go.
Anyways, here's the design for now! There are still a lot of things to refine and some to change, for example i'm not satisfied with the armor piece on the forearm. I also uploaded the naked anatomy base I made to build the armor over it. If you guys see any anatomical mistake that would really help me out!
Here's an image showing exactly what elements I took from whip spiders and how I tried integrating them to my design:
I'm a lot happier with this design! This really taught me why structuring my approach is important and i'm going to apply this in every future character design I make.
