BONUS CONTENT: Sketchbook: Maeki
For Maeki, one of Hiura’s crew, I had a pretty defined look in mind for her: lean and athletic build, some kind of short hairstyle, and plated armor that looked protective but wasn’t overly bulky.
With all of the rogue crew, I really wanted to push myself more in the female alien designs. With male aliens, I find I can go as wacky and weird as I want (Roka, Ril, Cember, etc). But with female aliens, in trying to keep some element of “attractiveness” to them, I tend to go a bit safer with more human features. So I deliberately tried to push the designs into more alien territory with the heads.
In the process, I learned something very interesting: for a female alien face, if I pushed the proportions too much, it didn’t work for me. But as long as I kept the eyes and mouth in the same relative placement as a human face, I could add plenty of alien features and the head would still work. In Maeki’s case, she has an angled snout, side cheek protrusions, and top horns, but with the eyes and mouth in roughly human relation to each other, the face works. As a contrast, the head with the longer distance between the eyes and mouth ends up looking more horse-y despite all the other features being mostly the same.
For the body, the torso plating came together fairly quickly, but the arm and leg armor took a bit more work to figure out. As armor, I thought it should have a bit of bulk, but as a wiry, athletic character, I didn’t want the armor to break that look. In the end, I settled on each section of armor having one larger central piece that protrudes a bit more, with two other pieces on either side that hug the body a bit closer to preserve the lean body shape.
For a more thorough breakdown, including more sketches and commentary, please check out my Patreon. This post 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!
I don’t think you should need to worry about keeping “some element of attractiveness” to female aliens. You should feel free to go wacky and weird with them too. How would female members of Ril’s or Roka’s species look like? Hopefully not like in Oglaf https://www.oglaf.com/dimorphism/
Ha ha. No, the females of Roka’s and Ril’s races would definitely not look human. But point taken. I guess “attractiveness” might not have been the right term. I think for me, it’s more about something visually feminine that makes them read as females of a race. Of course there will be lots of aliens where you probably couldn’t tell male from female (like Bennesaud’s race) and many cases where it won’t even be important to the story. But with Hiura’s rogues, I wanted it to be evident that it was an all-female crew. And for comics, where you don’t have the benefit of actual voices like you do in animation, I felt the need to have some sort of visual cue. But yes, I do hope to have even wackier alien females. In the meantime, I’m very happy about the recent designs at least being more alien than just human face shapes with minor wrinkles and bumps.