'Young Bird' Design

So, we're now creating bird characters and came up with an interesting concept. when chicks are born they're essentially naked and we thought we'd put a spin on this and make the younger character more human and as she matured she'd get more bird-like features or 'earn her feathers' so to speak. And with this in mind I started to create my character.

The bird features I decided to give to her were the beak, legs, feet and arms. I did contemplate giving her wings but as she's only a little 'chick' I decided to experiment with clothing to imitate different features instead. The poncho worked well to resemble wings I thought and I also looked at pumpkin pants because they have a nice balloon shape to them. I thought it was a nice way of achieving those feathery pants you see on chickens for example. 

You can see here that I was still considering different outfit designs and  took a lot of inspiration from tribal fashion from old to modern. I also looked at a lot of tribal colour themes and patterns. This one in particular was the one I was really drawn to and I'd like to use it for the final model too. 

As you can probably tell these pictures aren't digital. I decided to use my well loved pro markers to get nice flat colours for my drawings. I used these pens a lot when I'm working on colours for character designs because they're simple and I feel more at home doing traditional drawings rather than digital.