Design and the usefulness of ITERATION!

Hello once again!

So I thought it might be fun to share with you some of what I did to arrive at the variety of Fiction's current color palettes choices being used in the vote ^^

As can be guessed by seeing the title of this post, iteration is the main process I used to get there. Iteration is an important but also a simple enough concept that helps tremendously when it comes to exploring and testing out a design! With it, you can have fun playing with options and testing out tweaks and see if they help improve whatever you're creating ^^ 

It's very seldom for one's first idea to be their best as can be seen from this example of my initial experimentation vs something closer to what I ended up with:

I initially used some rough value sketching to create some basic ideas to start with in figuring out Fiction's design patterning. All I really knew going into it is that I wanted her to be lighter than Amyth and to not have too many similarities, if any, to his own design. I really want to show off the variety of my species so the two of them needed to be plenty different :3

Next, I tested out a handful of some rough wing patterning before narrowing down which ones I liked most! Here are some examples of that: 

After picking out a wing pattern I liked well enough, I tweaked it a bit further and move to the next step of the process... Color!

To begin, I went and gathered some color palettes from a variety of sources... Food, objects, games, places... the more the merrier!! :D

Here is a compilation of some of my favorites I chose for this project ^^

NOW... armed with this inspiration, I set about putting it to use and trying out all sorts of combinations so that I could look through them and figure out which ones spoke to me most!

NEEDLESS TO SAY.. I got a bit carried away here ^^; Easy enough to swap colors out though at this stage so why not go ham I felt :3

After creating these 120 tests (jesus) I took the time to narrow it down to a much more reasonable number of 35... and then narrowed that down to 14 and finally to just 6. I highlighted in red the options I chose through these last sets as well for you to see ^^

And there you have it! That's how those 6 options came to be and now its up to you all to decide which one will be used and tweaked further from this point and largely influence her final look <3

Also, as a reminder since the poll ends tomorrow - please go here to vote for your favorite option if you haven't already: https://www.patreon.com/posts/25728748

This character is gonna be seen quite a bit more and your votes will have a sizeable impact given that :3 

(Also, by no means am I an expert on this topic by the way, I just thought I'd share how I myself attempted to put it into practice! Hopefully this was of interest to some of you at least and thank you for checkin it out!)