Writer Wood Textures

I've been playing around with some different wood grain and colour so that I've got a decent reference when I make the final tweaks to the existing wood grain texture that I'm using for the Writer character - here are the front runners so far:

Character Designs: Margarita

The love interest in my story is a woman called Margarita who is made from paper.

Once again Weerawat Mungkung helped me with the character designs.

Below are some of the references that I sent to him and his character sketches showing how we got to the final design. (Latest at the top.)

Character Design: Writer

Weerawat helped me finish my character design for the writer so that I could begin modelling. Front and side views below.

Character Design: The Writer

Weerawat's been really kind and done some more stylised designs for the writer character. It's definitely got me thinking about a slightly different route for the design:

Character Design: Margarita - reference

Here are some reference images for the design for the character Margarita who will be made from the pages of books.

The question now is whether she will have the  organic look of the landscape and fashion models above, or the more structured look of the aeroplane passengers.

Character Design: Margarita

Here are some initial sketches for the character Margarita.

I think the next step is to figure out exactly how her paper texture is going to work. The key thing to explore is whether she is modeled in quite a smooth way and then has the paper texture applied - or whether the modeling reflects the material more, with crinkles, hard folds etc.

Maybe I'll try building a maquette from paper to see what would be physically possible and then apply those results to the CG model.

Character Design: The Writer - reference

Here's a reference sheet for the Writer character - drawing on a combo of Marouane Fellaini's strong craggy features and Chaplin's disheveled outfit.

Character Design: The Writer

Getting a bit further with the design for my hero character

Character Sketch: The Writer

Another sketch of the Writer character

Character Sketch: The Writer

Here's a first attempt at a sketch of my hero character.