Character dev. - embroidery & warrior class
To finish off my design for the jewellery mage class, I attempted a colour scheme which I felt fit the aesthetic of the class by using royal colours blue contrasting with the gold:
I replicated the shawl design in my own character design for the mage class. I thought having a shawl as part of the outfit would be both practical for the region (as during winter Kashmir has very cold weather and heavy snow) but also help distinguish its style from the jewellery mage class. I noticed that flowers and fruit are common motifs used in their embroidery, so I debated how these motifs could be used in game mechanics. A lot of nomadic tribes also reside in Kashmir so to stay authentic to their culture I wanted to depict their style correctly and research effectively. I found this a lot easier though as I am Kashmiri myself, but being from a diasporic community I am not from the culture that exists in Kashmir itself, nor are my family from a nomadic tribe, so I still needed to research appropriately to avoid gimmicky design.
Below are some initial designs for potential mage embroidery specialists, where I played around with the idea of the embroidery materialising into physical objects e.g. flowers:
Also with the advice of my tutor Jim, I used this design to develop a combat language for different flower types akin to the Victorian era of language of flowers (I opted to do this rather than create new designs for combat). I did quick concepts of some fighting abilities for various flowers using their appearance as inspiration for their ability below:
When I showed my tutor Josh the character design above last Friday, he suggested the potential to use the shawl akin to a flying carpet, i.e. being able to cast with the embroidery whilst flying on the shawl. I thought this was an idea worth pursuing as I could look at movement within a game. I will try to develop this design further as these were only first designs and I also want to test out alternate designs. I decided to start with colour from the start as it helped to formulate a colour theme which contrasts with the jewellery theme, also I wanted to avoid creating similar aesthetics between the specialisms. Here I went for darker, more subdued colours as it is more representative of the northern region of Kashmir, but still quite colourful. White is also an additional colour that is heavily used as cloth for Kashmiri embroidery so I will also try to use that in alternate designs later on for defensive magic (as the abilities above are all offensive).
To keep up momentum, my tutor Josh also recommended I start branching out my themes to encompass other classes (as I had been solely focused on magic up until now). Although I hadn't yet started on henna tattoos, I already had a foundation for jewellery and embroidery, so I could design how warrior classes in both jewellery and embroidery looked like and then move onto henna tattoos. The manner of working through these was up to me so I decided to go back to the jewellery theme for now and started designing potential warrior classes as seen below:
I created a colour theme from the jewellery mage I did before (first image of this post) to try to keep the aesthetic cohesive to the 'jewellery specialists'. I remembered a previous conversation I had with Josh about keeping the visual language the same, although the designs were different. I thought colour was one aspect I could do that as it also tied in with belonging to a certain specialism. In addition, I tried to incorporate the chakram bracelet theme into the warrior outfit in all three concepts in various ways, plus as a physical weapon for the second concept. I thought this way one way to keep the visual language the same as the mage class. I'm not sure if I was successful in this as I may just be staring at my drawings for so long that I only believe there is a connection, but at least I'm trying out methods. I'm not sure if I will choose any of these designs as my warrior class so I've decided to spend some time away from looking at these designs too much and come back to them later with a fresher mind.
For reference I combined South Asian fashion with military and fantastical elements to make it fit within a fantasy game environment:
Moving forward I will probably go back to the embroidery mage and develop the design further and when I'm happy with that I will also develop a warrior class for it before creating a mage and warrior class for henna tattoos (to be seen...).
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