Colour and texture

While still not going into any detail of the face of the person under the suit I began experimenting with colour and texture of the suits. My first studies of the colour were interesting but made the suit more super-hero-like and I didn't want there to be too much of that sort of feel as I thought it would perhaps take from the reality and gravitas that I wanted to show. Tatopoulos (2004) agrees and states "For me, the design must have a grounding in the real world. We all make our own limits and I want to keep it as believable as possible" (2004:125)

I only went with darker hues because any use of too bright colours would be harder to realise and again I had to keep the suits function in mind.

Once I had a colour scheme I liked, I began to work on the finer details such as the textures, initially I wanted to use a denticle like texture as it had not been done before but unfortunately I found it impossible to replicate as a texture or a brush to illustrate. The closest I could get was a fish/reptile-like scale texture but this did not work as well as I had hoped. Below are texture samples I created....

Another problem I came across was that many of the textures I created although looked good, gave the mute-suit a metallic feel, this was something I had to avoid as the suit needed to be completely malleable. The texture that I found worked best was one I created by inverting a dimple pattern and then tiling it closely.

Below are studies I did showing the textures on the suits...

Once I had my color scheme, texture and style locked down I began working on the person inside the suit.