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Description
This year, I resolved to buff up my portfolio with more character design pieces in my ongoing quest to get a job as an in-house concept designer. One of the things that got my into art in the first place was drawing out the scenes and characters from the books my mother would read us as children, so it felt natural to me to design a set of literary characters to be translated to comic page or screen. Eon: Dragoneye Reborn was an instant choice. Playing with fantasy-asia, gender roles and magic dragons? sign me up! plus i get to do research on ancient chinese fashion and weaponry? can it get any better?

so this is the titular character; Eon aka Eona. She's basically Mulan with a magic dragon. errr...a bigger magical dragon. instead of the army, she cross-dresses her way into the imperial court, bluffing her age, gender and magical prowess. She's a 16 year old with a badly healed broken hip who is masquerading as a twelve year old boy eunuch. i'm not quite happy with her design yet, i'm not sure she looks chinese enough.

in the story, she struggles constantly with suppressing her femininity and being off balance (both magically and physically) due to it. to represent this visually, I've tried to include crescent curves and ying-yang shapes into her design. she's also the 'mirror dragoneye' so ovals are included as sort of a 'spice color' shape. wherever i can, i try to make curves, but because she's always struggling to become complete, the oval to crescent ratio is small. at some point in the story, she does become self-actualized and restores balance within herself, conveniently coinciding with a costume change. at that point, i plan to include more ovals and symmetry to represent her coming to completeness.

the hairstyle is mildly important in the story, as it is indicated that the special "double loop queue" hairstyle is reserved only for those of Dragoneye (read; mage) status. im still trying to figure out what 'double loop queue' means. so thats why there are so many hair style exploration sketches lol. the hair studies with only a braid or a bun are for when she's still a peasant boy.

she gets 3 major costume changes in the book: her apprentice candidate training outfit (bottom left), her imperial palace 'story robe' (bottom right) and her self-actualization battle clothes (bottom, third from the left). in addition, she gets a pair of curved swords from her ancestress. personally, i'm leaning toward a pair of dao or those sort of half-circle kukuri (?) blades in the middle row.

im struggling a little bit with how historical to make it. on one hand, i want to be careful with playing with cultural garb from not my native culture; however the book itself isnt too fussy about historical details. they have weather-changing DRAGONS for chrissake. So im hoping that my current plan for a loose fantasy interpretation blending the han and the qing dynasties with a little heian era japan sprinkled in isnt too much of a stretch from the tone of the original.

all of these were drawn by hand at work lol. so sorry for the crap scan quality, some of them are on the back of canceled receipts

ive got more coming, i just wanted to share where i was so far

Description
This year, I resolved to buff up my portfolio with more character design pieces in my ongoing quest to get a job as an in-house concept designer. One of the things that got my into art in the first place was drawing out the scenes and characters from the books my mother would read us as children, so it felt natural to me to design a set of literary characters to be translated to comic page or screen. Eon: Dragoneye Reborn was an instant choice. Playing with fantasy-asia, gender roles and magic dragons? sign me up! plus i get to do research on ancient chinese fashion and weaponry? can it get any better?

so this is the titular character; Eon aka Eona. She's basically Mulan with a magic dragon. errr...a bigger magical dragon. instead of the army, she cross-dresses her way into the imperial court, bluffing her age, gender and magical prowess. She's a 16 year old with a badly healed broken hip who is masquerading as a twelve year old boy eunuch. i'm not quite happy with her design yet, i'm not sure she looks chinese enough.

in the story, she struggles constantly with suppressing her femininity and being off balance (both magically and physically) due to it. to represent this visually, I've tried to include crescent curves and ying-yang shapes into her design. she's also the 'mirror dragoneye' so ovals are included as sort of a 'spice color' shape. wherever i can, i try to make curves, but because she's always struggling to become complete, the oval to crescent ratio is small. at some point in the story, she does become self-actualized and restores balance within herself, conveniently coinciding with a costume change. at that point, i plan to include more ovals and symmetry to represent her coming to completeness.

the hairstyle is mildly important in the story, as it is indicated that the special "double loop queue" hairstyle is reserved only for those of Dragoneye (read; mage) status. im still trying to figure out what 'double loop queue' means. so thats why there are so many hair style exploration sketches lol. the hair studies with only a braid or a bun are for when she's still a peasant boy.

she gets 3 major costume changes in the book: her apprentice candidate training outfit (bottom left), her imperial palace 'story robe' (bottom right) and her self-actualization battle clothes (bottom, third from the left). in addition, she gets a pair of curved swords from her ancestress. personally, i'm leaning toward a pair of dao or those sort of half-circle kukuri (?) blades in the middle row.

im struggling a little bit with how historical to make it. on one hand, i want to be careful with playing with cultural garb from not my native culture; however the book itself isnt too fussy about historical details. they have weather-changing DRAGONS for chrissake. So im hoping that my current plan for a loose fantasy interpretation blending the han and the qing dynasties with a little heian era japan sprinkled in isnt too much of a stretch from the tone of the original.

all of these were drawn by hand at work lol. so sorry for the crap scan quality, some of them are on the back of canceled receipts

ive got more coming, i just wanted to share where i was so far