First of all I love his design!! He radiates so much personality and I can’t help but like him straight away. The design is rather simple but very unique and says quite a bit about his character already as well, which is no small feat to achieve at all.
However, I do have to admit I prefer the 2018 version of his design, with the green coat. I think you did well on adapting the style to be more realistic, so shape language wise I have nothing to say even if the vibes are different. No my gripe is definitely with the colors, like you yourself do. I don’t know what about it you disliked to want to change, but I really like this olive green as his main color, and it really makes the redder parts of his design pop, all concentrated at the center which draws the eye in nicely. I think the contrast makes the whole design very readable and neat, both in values and tone. Which, I think the contrast actually makes the red more noticeable, in the newer one the reddish tones feel more like mauve, whereas with the green design the red does feel like it’s, well, red and like more of a noticeable easter egg with Mei Lin. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that red is his house colors.
But I do see that perhaps the older colors don’t fit as well with the rest of the cast, tone wise. The newer one does a better job at giving an air of nobility. But my main gripe is the readability of the coat’s pattern. It is very hard to discern the pattern unless you look and try, at first before I saw the green coat version I had no idea at all that it was a dragon and assumed it was a damask pattern wallpaper sort of pattern, the colors do lean towards that vibe as well. My suggestion for this without changing much else is to make the grey darker, like I tried here: https://sta.sh/21dhjdmvz8ss?edit=1 But you could also try tweaking the saturation of the colors for a more visible contrast. Or maybe like in the older version the dragon pattern could be darker than the coat’s color instead, that could also make an interesting mirroring of Mei Lin’s patterns which are lighter than the cloth’s base color, whatever that could mean about them or just for visual funsies.
Something you could also try is incorporating the pants and shoes’ colors into the palette. They feel sort of weirdly disconnected from the rest of the pattern, not with any notable hue or complementary nature to the rest. Maybe the end of the boot’s color could be the coat’s color, or maybe the grey matches the pipe’s middle. The current grey of the coat and the pants’ colors are similar enough that I think it may contribute to the faded visibility effect as well.
These are my thoughts, I hope they’re helpful! These are all pretty much nitpicks, the design works very well anyways imo and it hooked me right away when I saw it like I said! Makes me want to read his story legit
Tam Ravenclaw's Comments