sculpt iteration

I took the loose idea I had from the sketch and started sculpting different iterations of the same design, initially the idea was to have most of the clothes loose material with only tight areas in the feet, hands and the middle of the torso where the armour restricts the cloth. I kind of imagined that this would just work with the archer image, making him look swift and agile.

I didn't like this at all, not only was the cloth kind  of awkward to sculpt for me but the whole design just looked very bulky and not what I was going for at all.

I decided to take the same design and just balance it a bit, I thought the 'skirt' looked fine but I wanted to change the top I though this would achieve the look I was imagining better.

I remade the upper body and not only does the whole design flow a lot better now but the chainmail coming from the helmet looks more fitting, not that that was a particularly important part of the design concept but I thought it looked a little awkward before. The chainmail guarding the neck but hanging freely gives more of a sense that this guy is not a conventional soldier, I think this reinforces the concept that he is a righteous law holder who acts in temperance. The fact that his face is obscured, even though I wasn't fond of that at first actually reinforces the concept too I think. 

the cloth was kind of giving me some trouble so I was looking at some reference images, I had been using some Jean-Leon Gerome paintings as reference as I already had some on my computer, so I used some of the characters in his paintings as reference to get an idea of how the clothes should look. I figured I could get a pretty good pattern using a rake-like brush so I had a look at the available alpha brushes and found one that I thought was perfect.

One of the problems to consider when using alphas I think is restraint, I could just rake the brush over but I think that at that point it looks kind of uniform and unnatural so I tried to be as minimalistic as I could, using a few stroked to suggest the effect that I was after, and I also found that switching between the zadd and zsub functions it created a more natural flow. I will certainly consider this in the future.

Some of the additional images I used/will use in reference