Aurelia – Sky Across – Character concept art

Aurelia is the main character of my IP project “Sky Across”, a project and story that has been rattling in my brain for nearly two decades.
The setting and world are very inspired by ancient Illyrian and Slavic people and traditions, as I spent a lot of time learning about them during my studies at the Art Academy.
The setting explores the relations and tensions between different city-states and bigger surrounding nations, with Aurelia being one of the potential heirs to one of them. The story will also feature a fair deal of magic and mythology.

The image depicts 3 concept designs of a character in a realistic style. All 3 concepts are for the same character, done in black lineart on a gray background. The concepts show a young woman in 3 different outfits, loosely based on traditional Croatian clothing styles and ornamental motifs that go back to late antiquity and early middle ages. The first concept has the woman in a more formal attire with an embroidered vest over a white shirt with very loose sleeves, and a calf-length wide skirt with geometric motifs running down the bottom. She's wearing low boots and is leaning on a staff. The middle version shows her in a more day to day style with high boots, wide-legged pants, scarves tied around her waist, a loose shirt and a sleeveless vest, leaning on a plain wooden staff. The 3rd version is the character in her adventuring outfit of tight pants, shirt, more rugged boots, and an assortment of tools and weapons.

Aurelia is generally an outgoing introvert, and prefers dealing with everyday life and things instead of learning about ruling and politics. However, life has different plans for her. With these concepts I wanted to explore the different “roles” and phases she goes through: ceremonial, everyday town life, her “adventuring” outfit, and a more guerrilla-warfare-meets-myths-and-legends costume. I started on these concepts by first thinking about her personality and what kind of gesture would go with it, and then finding references and stock photos that would be a good reference. I did the figure drawing part during a “figure drawing Saturday” event in one of the discord servers I’m in.

I spent some time looking up different traditional clothing from my region, ornamental details and traditions, and some general medieval-ish fantasy references. Instead of making a different moodboard file, I threw the images I liked directly into the photoshop file I was working in. I did rough sketches of the shapes and forms I wanted to explore, and then went over with a smoother brush to clean up the lines and shapes. I did this with every design, pulling up more references with each new design I wanted to do. For the everyday and adventuring looks, I already had a pretty good idea in mind as to what I want it to look like (grounded fantasy), but I still looked at references to decide what I wanted to do with the details (laces, so many laces).

The last “demonic” design is based on a tradition of “zvončari” from my region – people (traditionally men), dressed as scary beasts, going around from place to place, ringing big bells to scare away winter and bring in spring. The event lasts for about a week before Lent, and it has pagan roots.

Once I was fairly happy with the designs, I started exploring different color and value combinations.

This part was a little more surprising to me, as I already had general color ideas I wanted to use – found in traditional outfits, but as I played more with the combinations, I found I preferred ones that were actually quite different. I ended up with a lot of options I liked, with varying value structures and moods.

It was a lot of fun trying to get this character down after “knowing her” in my head for so long. I picked one version to bring to a polish, although I might revisit some other variants I love as well sometime in the future.

The image shows a stylized character illustration of the main character of Sky Across - Aurelia - on a white background. The character is a female, standing while leaning on a tall regal staff, while dressed in a "ceremonial" outfit for her setting. She’s wearing a stiff pale cream dress with blue decorative linings around the edges, and a v-neck cut, a gold feathery shawl draped over her shoulders, and she has thigh-high blue and orange leather boots with a small heel. She’s wearing gold jewelry, her earrings feature the same blue gemstone as her staff, while the leaf motif repeats between the bits of staff and her necklace pendant. She’s wearing a gold feathery tiara that matches her scarf. Her hair is long and dark red/purple, with a braid coiled around her head behind the tiara.
Aurelia – Sky Across, character illustration (2023) – Final render of the character.