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As the leader of the new crew of rogues, Hiura was an important character that I wanted to get right. Unlike the rest of her crew, she didn’t have any defining physical characteristics in her write-up, so she was the most open-ended of all the characters to design, which made her the hardest to nail down. For my initial passes, I tried some humanoid forms while still playing with proportions to keep it from being too basic. I also tried to keep a feminine form, using some semblance of an hourglass figure without being exactly human in shape.

For the head, I had the same “blank slate” problem I had with the body, so I just started drawing random heads. Again, I tried to maintain some semblance of feminine features while pushing the alien look and not going for just an easy, slight tweak on a human face. Eventually I settled on a head and body that worked well together and moved on to the costume, which I knew I wanted to be inspired by biker outfits.

I like to have my characters dress more casually when on their ships, so my first pass was just the pants and a simple top, saving the jacket for later. I knew the costume color would predominantly be a simple black, so I felt the design had to rely more on detail and texture to make it visually interesting. That meant a lot of trim and banded areas to break up the form, and while those details can certainly add time to the drawing of a character each time, I do think it makes the costume more fun to look at.

I am a huge fan of the Game of Thrones TV series, and in the later seasons, Daenerys Targaryen wore a white fur coat that had a really striking spine detail in the back. For Hiura’s jacket, I wanted to do something slightly reminiscent of that, so in some of the back sketches, you can see me playing with that shape.

For a much more thorough breakdown of both the design of Hiura and the design of her costume, check out my Patreon. These posts will be public, so anyone can view it without being a backer. If you’d like to back the series on Patreon for more bonus content like this one, support is always very much appreciated!