I participated in another CGHub challenge and the topic was to re-imagine The Legend of Zelda universe. I like sci-fi, so I went with a sci-fi spin...
I originally thought of Zelda in futuristic garb but then I got this idea of her hair being made of electrical tubes or something. A quick backstory came to mind: in this futuristic age of Hyrule, "ZELDA" is the name of the main computer frame at Hyrule Castle that overlooks the whole kingdom/city. Her hair tubes keep her plugged into the system and this is when she's at her strongest, power-wise, however, she can unplug herself with the expense of weakening her energy. When she goes mysteriously missing (or Ganondorf captures her, whatever) her memory is implanted into a proxy unit called "Sheik". The suit helps maintain her energy, even if she's miles away from Hyrule Castle.
So getting to painting the final image, I initially wanted to paint both Zelda and Sheik at the same time, but this concept was too difficult to execute without confusing the hell out of the viewer. In this first WIP shot, I liked the pose and the holographic lyre attached to her left arm, but the rest of the concept had to change...
...and so this is the final. I simplified the concept by just sticking to Zelda, who had the stronger visual design in the exploratory sketches compared to Sheik. I geeked out a bit on the details on the upper half of her body...
What I learned/experienced:
The tricky part of this character was to balance the recognition of the original character design with the re-imagining. For Zelda, I focused on keeping her key features: pointy ears, colours, hair style, and that long cloth thing that she wears over her dress while redesigning everything else around them.
