Materials from the Wagadu Empire mood board
Some materials that i found were commonly used were materials like silk, cotton and brocade that people from the Wagadu empire would use to fabricate their clothing. They would use these materials as they were usually satisfied with whatever they could find.
Wagadu clothing uses lots of vibrant colours and quite golden, sandy colours for their clothes. their hair its very eye drawing and the colours contrast well with their clothing. A common pattern involved triangles that were grouped together in different colours. Armour is mainly on joints more then likely to prevent loss of mobility should they be hit with something like an arrow in that area.
Designing my character.
Using a program called make human to make a base mesh for my character that i can take into blender and add further features to was the first step. I played with the setting like body size and shape, hair, finger length, eyes, skin colour. Until i had a base for my character that i was happy with. I brought the mesh into blender where i then started to select faces that resembled the style of clothing that was in my reference images around my character and then duplicate and then separate to create the clothing that i will later texture. For the face i wanted to add some warrior esque face paint so that you can tell that the she was a warrior even without her weapon, i also used the smear brush to make the edges of the paint less sharp. I then unwrapped the clothing from earlier and use one of the images from my mood board as a texture as i quite liked the pattern and found it would be helpful to use it as reference when i am actually drawing over and making my own texture in photoshop. For the strings hanging in the middle of the skirt and the arm bands i decided to use the textures of the dora milaje from black panther as the design as they are really iconic and i felt that they would make for a nice use as black panther and the dora milaje were a huge milestone for representation. Then i started to add more detail such as golden bands on her forearm as in reference images on things like my mood board the warriors had accessories like that.
I took my two view renders into photoshop and drew an outline of my character which i found easy enough but when i was doing the hand drawn textures on the top and skirt as they were so different and varied and it took a while to draw but after i found the rest easier and less time consuming. I found using a render helpful as i can exaggerate and change certain parts of my character as the hair was small in the render and i wanted to give her an afro as that is a typical and common black hair style. For the bow and arrow i looked at some images of bows and arrows and thought how i can make this look authentic, simple and practical. The spear was the more challenging one as i had to think of a cool yet real design and the rope was the hardest part to draw for me as it found it hard to get the natural shape that i was going for but eventually i got a result i was happy with and after i got all my drawing down i add description for the objects that i felt needed describing like what it is used for and how its helpful.
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