This is what for now is the final design of my OC, Harvest. He is a sort of companion character to my OC, Thumbelina. I took a lot of inspiration from nostalgic sources when trying to really hone in on his design and make it more intentional.
I always planned on making him based off of a firefly- I had the idea to make all of the fairies in the story based on actual flying creatures/bugs- because I think fireflies are very special and beautiful, and he would be an important character in the story. It also hints at his more playful or silly nature; he can be a bit somber and graceful but a silly beetle nonetheless.
I also can't create a story or character without taking some inspiration from one of my favorite movies, Labyrinth. I can't say that Gareth was the major design inspiration, but I did take his fashion into account when designing, and I think that can be seen with the high waisted leggings and tall boots.
The hardest design challenge was the colors (but that is always a challenge for me) but also how to make the clothes feel like they were really being worn by a fairy. For this there was nowhere else to look but Pixie Hollow, of course. The OG fairy design, truly cannot get better than that IMO. Honestly I think it would be difficult to try to truly improve on the design principles of Pixie Hollow fairies- all of their clothing has some sort of texture implying that they were really cut and sewn from leaves and petals, and hand stitched! So I didn't even bother trying to be incredibly out of the box in that regard. I tried to differ them slightly by the more natural color palette and the clothing being a bit more sophisticated, rather than playful and pretty. I also added bits of metal as armor and gave him a capelet with a sunflower seed button. I can just see him unfastening it to toss the cape to the side before a battle.
The shape of the cape and the yellow stripe on it is directly a reference to his lightning bug origins- his color palette is as well. If I'm being honest, I just color picked off of the reference image until I got a palette I liked and went from there. Hard to get a more natural color palette than that, right? Finally, I gave him a little sewing needle shoved through a button as his sword. A natural weapon for a little knight.
Thanks for reading!
- Miz