Name: Ellie Ansell
Email: ellie.ansell@live.co.uk
Facebook art page: facebook.com/ellieansellart
I'd recently finished a book called 'Planets' by Dava Sobel, which covered the solar system, metals, moons, mythology, astrology and astrology. Naturally, this followed for my sketches to be littered with space references; after having learnt about various absence and abundances of metals and gases on the planets, I thought it could be interesting to conceptualise a character which 'stole' those elements, either to rid them of life, or plant elements unto moons like seeds.
As someone whose designs are strongly influenced by recent interests, I'd also begun watching Blue Planet - a documentary on marine wildlife - and figured, what's the use of a space creature looking anything like a human? There are some really whacky fish out there, I could easily gain inspiration from those! And so, the sketches followed.
Following some very rough designs in my sketch book, I spent a few nights doing coloured sketches with lighting. This helped me to roughly convey the characters' prowess and outline their background story, hopefully lending to less drastic changes when iterating character designs once i've decided on which to work on.
Moving on, I decided to choose the first character as my primary inspiration and went to iterate through clothing and props. I played with her potential strengths: gracious and elegant, a sneaky combat-ninja sort, a warrior who had at least some protection from battering, and a mixture.
I settled on version 4 and will add more detail from there. I didn't want her to be too elegant and lady-like... but just a little bit. Afterall, she is a goddess!
Next, working with style 4...
