Since finishing my silhouettes and starting my iteration, I have decided that I will use the silhouette of the princess in the torn dress as my starting point, as I want my character to be a demon of some kind, which is why she is locked away in the castle, so that people don't see who she really is. As a result of this, her dress would be torn and/or dirty and she will be mistreated because of it.
As I have a basic idea on what I want my character's dress to look like, I decided to work on other parts of her, beginning with the head. Whilst I kept the head shape the same, I created a variety of different eyes, ears and noses to see which ones would fit a more demonic appearance, ranging from pointy and normal ears, to a pig-like nose and huge eyes. In the end I settled with a face with more human-like eyes with the iris missing, which I can make look more demonic once coloured. I wanted her ears to be pointed so that she has some clear indicators that she is not human, and often demons are portrayed with pointed ears.
Having decided what face to use, I began creating some hair designs. Looking into Georgian fashion and hairstyles, it was clear that women often had a lot of hair and crazy hairdos, so I began working with a beehive-like hair style as well as just a large amount of hair, but I had the thought that if she is supposed to be hidden and mistreated for how she is, then she would either have very untidy hair or short hair, as it was expected of high-class women to have huge perms, so she would be forced to have short hair (or at least not have it looking very fancy). Because of this thought process I created a few varying hairstyles. Out of the ones below, my favourites have to be the bottom middle one with the bandages, or the second from top right one because of the vast differences between that hairstyle and those back in the Georgian era.
I settled on the hairstyle without bandages because I felt it would be a bit easier to work with and the shorter hairstyle just suited the face a lot better in my opinion. I duplicated the hairstyle that I liked and then began making small tweaks to it to see if there is anything I prefer, such as small fringe changes or different hair lengths. The bottom left one, although not much different, is my favourite one due to it staying pretty much like the original, but I fixed part of the fringe that didn't really curve around her face quite right.
Since the hairstyle is now settled, I began designing some horns, which are commonly placed on demons. I simply started looking into different horns commonly given to demons and settled on wanting some fairly short horns to give the impression of young age (similar to deer's antlers, where the length is determined by age). From the designs below, the top left captures this idea the best so will be the horns I go with for her.
I then began working on how her legs should work; whether they should be normal human legs or digitigrade legs, which are seen on animals like dogs, cats and pigs, and is similar to a human leg, but the creature stands more on it's toes and it's foot is more upright. I want to work with a digitigrade leg because it will be a bit more of a challenge and will be more fun to work with, as well as making her look a bit more feral or demonic.
Below are some simple feet designs with the different legs, working almost exclusively with claws because it separates her even more from a human appearance and creates that more demonic look with more angular points, creating an evil vibe. I eventually settled on the furthest right foot design simply because it looked the most animalistic whilst also simply looking the best in my opinion.
Because the legs and feet are vastly different from the human anatomy, I decided to also work on the hands, creating similar designs and focuses on claws and long nails, settling on the two fingers design for the same reasons as the choice of foot.
Since I already had the idea of her staying humanoid beyond the areas I explored above, I decided to actually begin piecing her together, with the body designs below being the results. A couple of changes are noticeably visible, such as more angular ears and the beauty spot added to the face, both of which were added just as a trial and I preferred that they were there. Because she is locked inside the castle, two thoughts came into my mind:
-She is not fed much so is slim.
-Is fed reasonably but does not receive much exercise.
These thoughts resulted in me creating two different body shapes for my demon so that I can later decide which I prefer.
I created some dress designs based on the silhouette that I was using as my main influence. Keeping the dresses simple seemed like the best idea to me because I doubt that the King and Queen would give fancy clothing to someone they were hiding, but would also not give her the simplest clothing because she is the princess. The tears and damage to the dress can either be a result of mistreatment or from her own behaviour, but most likely her tearing at it.
I eventually settled on the thinner design because I felt that the King and Queen would not treat a demon as well as they would treat a human, but also because I preferred the dress design I had drawn for the slimmer version. I did tweak the dress a little bit before shading it to create this final design, such as removing the purple line from between the breasts and adding some more detail to the dress, as well as adding more prominent lips to her since I felt her face was a little plain.
I really like this design now and feel that it actually looks like a final design, instead of before where it kept looking like something was missing from it. The design looks human-like, but far enough away to make it obvious she is not human, which is what I wanted to capture in her design.
I tried to keep her design and attire far enough away from the norm of upper-class society in the Georgian era because she is essentially a prisoner in the castle held captive by the King and Queen, so she would not receive all the fancy hairdos, jewellery etc. that others would, and would not receive weapons either, but her claws and horns could easily replace those. Footwear of that time would simply not fit her feet at all, and accessories would by minimal due to being given little by the King and Queen. In terms of the colour scheme, the reddish skin is because demons are commonly depicted with red or pale skin. Red to match the hellish or fire vibes, and pale to match a more supernatural or ghostly vibe. I chose red simply to make it more obvious she isn't human instead of just possibly looking ill. The black eyes, horns, claws and lips were to give her a more inhuman vibe and branch more towards the demonic or evil look. The dress colour scheme was because I felt darker colours look a bit more dirty or lower class as opposed to the bright colours worn by the upper class to make them stand out more. The greys and purples were simply because these worked the best in my opinion as opposed to the other colour schemes I had tried out.
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