Pear and Rat Clothing Iteration and Feedback

With the head and hair design and colours sorted it's time to work on the clothing. Working from the images I gathered during the research period I experimented on four different styles each for the characters. Starting with the Pear of Anguish.

With these I was looking to incorporate three different things:

1: The leaves/petals of the actual torture device
2: Mechanical looking items/colours to work on the fear of machines and a steam-punk theme.
3: French style clothing from the chosen era.

Here is the feedback.

A few people chose 3, I really wasn't feeling the look of 3 too much as I felt it looked a little plain and not as steampunkish as the rest, I loved the shoulders from it so I went a little bit more with my own feelings on this character. 1 was mentioned a couple of time so I combined 1 and 4 with the shoulders of three. Here is the final result. I'm really feeling this character and can't wait to begin work on the final piece!

Now too the rat! With this character I was looking to use, again three things.

1: The bucket that held the rat (rat included)
2: The buboes and rat bites to trigger off tryphophobia
3: Robes and bindings to play off Merinthophobia

The clothing itself I ended up just using the chemise and worked on degrading that down as shown, as I was working I was finding that adding the rich style clothing wasn't working so I just left the hair as the implied posh past life.

this was really challenging because to show the buboes I have to have the clothing ripped up to a certain point, however buboes appear on the neck and in the groin area, this isn't going to work from an exhibition standpoint because of obvious reasons, I can't display a female characters genitals in an exhibition where families and young children could see it (having an eaten open chest is fine though). With 3 and 4 I worked around this by having huge bubo clusters that cover everything up.

I was struggling with making the ropes look good in these shots, mainly because I wanted that pose but in the final piece the ropes would be tight, holding the arms and legs together mostly. Here is the feedback I got with these designs

Mostly people chose 2, personally I really love the bucket on the head rather than being over the stomach, I wanted to make it look like she had taken the bucket from the stomach and used it as a shield over her head, to hide the bites and damage to her face and hair, it makes her look really surreal which adds to the viewers discomfort.

I did feel it looked a little blander however than the others, mainly because the lack of ropes on the lower half. I took the ropes from 3 and added a few more buboes, originally I wanted to give her a bucket as a weapon but I'm really not feeling giving any of the ladies weapons. I will have to learn how to draw animals now because she is going to be accompanied by a rat! A nice big rat!

Now all my characters have been created from head to toe I can begin planning out how the final pieces will look!