Cutting my teeth on some character design after a long while. For practice, I chose an already established, beloved character from a less-known Science Adventure series: Chaos;Head.
While I love the Visual Novel and appreciate its art (especially Rimi’s design), what irked me the most about it was the cognitive dissonance in Takumi’s design — he was written as a paranoid loner who often does overnight gaming, but his art is very clean and handsome despite frayed hair.
So here’s my attempt at VERY ROUGHLY redesigning the character. However, I gave myself two challenges for it:
1) Try to stay true to the “written” design as opposed to the “drawn” design, and show his personality in the drawings alone.
2) Change the style sufficiently for more expressiveness (this should help give me some practice for another project I’m working on).
Did I succeed? On the contrary, there are still many issues in my re-design that still continue to betray the original character, albeit in a different way.