Full Illustration Commission - Ramlethal Valentine
Added 2023-07-22 12:01:37 +0000 UTCGuilty Gear's Ramlethal Valentine, as commissioned by a very patient and supportive client a little while back! Working with her swords, simultaneously my favourite and most frustrating aspect of her design was tricky.
Getting a pose and composition that best showed off every element of her extremely dense costume/complex silhouette was a real challenge, and I included the thumbnails submitted to give an idea of how many ways I tried to rearrange all those moving parts until we settled on a final design.
I averaged out elements of both her costumes from Guilty Gear Xrd and Guilty Gear Strive, but ultimately leaned more towards Xrd. It'd be fun to approach designing her again someday from a modelsheet style perspective and do a more elaborate "Redesign", but here I wanted to just celebrate what work Daisuke and the GG design team have already done.
That said, I did take some liberties with the fleshy interior of the "Maw cape" that she has, curling the "fangs" into clutching digits and stressing the raw, veiny texture.
You might notice the "Bonus" thumbnail at the bottom which was my very indulgent offering to redesign her completely into a hypothetical Justice-alike, given her connection to Aria in the setting (Non GG fans - don't worry about it) . The client was tempted but ultimately opted to go with the classic design, and I don't blame them, but i'll probably hold onto and maybe revisit that thumbnail on my own time regardless.
