New tribal Ka'chkka, process

whoo I am on a roll with these posts! Anyway, I spent all day researching tribal costumes and thinking of how in the world I could design Ka'chkka in a way to make him more ethnic.

This is what he looked like before, a very pretty boy. but this is something I didn't want my characters to look like so I wasn't happy with it completely. However, this IS mainly still how he looks without all his accoutrement:


Okay, so I quickly realized this design would be vastly different. I can't just put a beaded necklace and tunic on someone and call him 'tribal' oh no! So here's the initial sketch (Cyg just happens to be there too) lol:


Here I drew in the legs in the comp and printed it out:


The cleaner pencils after I lightboxed the printout. I almost never do this, but I kinda had to in this case:


The inks! I like inking, but drawing him this way in the comic will be headache-inducing, but I think it's worth it:


Flats! The At'rik still have purple skin, though the more At'rik blood, the darker the skin would be. Ka'ch is one of the only full At'rik left, so this is as dark as it gets:


Aaand some shading to polish it off for online viewing:


Speaking of that, the Deviation is here!

All in all I'm glad I made the effort to do the research in order to make the cultural history of the FT world more diverse. ^__^