Personal Work: ISDRA
For my personal work, I usually create my own stories which feature original characters. This story, which I have been working on since 2019, is a sci-fi fantasy where an evil extradimensional organisation's actions cause a shockwave of trouble which echoes through various universes.
Reference Sheets
The main villains of my story, called ISDRA, are actually the same being which has been split up into several segments. This character is meant to be an abstract, extradimensional concept, so in their designs, I decided to exaggerate the hair shapes and assign each one a shape and colour which they could be designed around.
As well as ISDRA, there is also a group of henchmen they order about, which are typical people who were stolen and raised in an extradimensional space, so they have no concept of what a typical world looks like. therefore, I wanted to also give their clothes a more abstract look, like they're pretending to be clothes without understanding how they actually look. The four characters who look more ragged and patchy are the Ferly, who are not favoured by ISDRA, while the last two are more favoured.
Illustrations
Illustration of ISDRA.
Character study of ISDRA.
Black & White environment study with the Ferly.
Character Redesign
As my skills have evolved, I usually need to redesign my characters, as I look back and realise what could be improved in previous incarnations. This progression shows how I redesigned this specific character this year, who is meant to be another extradimensional villain related to ISDRA. My process usually includes sketching out my general idea before going to a digital program to visualise it better.
2020
2021
Technique Progress
To showcase how my technique has improved over the years, recently I recreated an old drawing of my main henchmen characters from when they were first visualised. This way I could see how my understanding of composition, colour, anatomy and body language has increased greatly.
2019
2023
I also produced this image to compare and contrast the earliest and latest versions of these characters, as I feel it presents how my character design knowledge in general has changed drastically.