Process Log 8: Seignik Bahamut Skin

Remember that chibi proportioned character I was working on modeling a few posts back? I'm still working on him, but I came up with an alternate skin off to the side for fun. It all started when I went back to a 2 year old drawing I never finished:

I never finished this chibinized Bahamut from Final Fantasy X because there was simply too much going on with his design that I got bored of coloring in the visual noise. When I drew the sketch 2 years back, I thought it would've been fun to paint the details in, but no. It wore me out and I never looked at this drawing again until this year. (Sad to say, this chibi is probably going into The Scrap Pile.)

The Idea:
Then I thought: how can I compensate for the effort I lost in painting this chibi? I'd always wanted to do an Aeon chibi from FFX and Bahamut was my favorite.

I did some brainstorming and Seignik, that one character I was modeling, popped up in my head. I sketched out an idea and blocked it's line art in with black to test it's silhouette. That's when I got the idea for a Bahamut skin for Seignik.

The Process:

The final concept

Solving the Color Challenge:

I had some issues when deciding what the final color was going to be. Seignik's Bahamut skin is based off the design seen in FFX, so my original intention was to stay close to the design and color scheme of the FFX Bahamut. When I applied its flat colors, none of it seemed to work together.

The top left iteration was the original design's color scheme. In my attempts to fix this problem, I did several iterations, experimenting with various color combos and trying to balance contrast at the same time. Then I had another idea...

I recalled that I liked the color scheme of FFXIII's Bahamut: the purple theme was unique and I loved the accent of the red claws. I applied this color scheme to my concept and it worked much better than my original intent. 

Conclusion:

The most challenging factor I had with painting this concept was balancing color and contrast. The wings on this design were particularly distracting, so what I ended up doing was pushing the wings back by muting and blurring it a bit to bring the main body - my main focus - to the foreground. I also missed painting in graphic/cartoon style. 

And once the Seignik model is done, I hope to model this skin next. :'D