My Mysterious Character Challenge Progress: Brainstorming, Sculptin...

2000+ challengers and counting. I think it’s safe to assume that a lot of these challengers are humans.
Yea, I mean a lot of these challengers are ranging from a hobbyist who wants to win a new tablet, to an art student who’s looking to challenge his artistic skill, to a professional character artist who joins the contest in their spare time from working on their company’s tasks.

8-bit music starts playing
"A wild Nobody appeared!"

The contest has 5 categories, the 4 other categories only have around 100 - 800 challengers, and here I am barging into the Character Design category with 2000+ well-prepared challengers like nobody's business.

^{Mischievous: The Jester WIP hi-poly sculpt}

Brought to you by MSI, Wacom, Procreate, Adobe, KitBash 3D, and Infinite Painter, Artstation presents: Lightbox Expo: Box of Mystery, a mysterious world where creativity is the way!

That is the theme of the challenge. The good news is, it lasts for 6 weeks!

That's a lot of time to thoughtfully design my character to the best of my--

...But the task is to make 6 characters!

Well...
^{^shit}

The challenge is to design 6 unique characters with predetermined archetypes; 1 leader, 1 brave, 1 joyful, 1 mischievous, 1 serious, and 1 wild character. That's one chara per week. Here I am with my problem with working within a short deadline. What a time to be alive!

But but butt! This is a challenge after all. If it's easy then what's so cool about it, right? Do you find breathing awesome? Exactly. Maybe this is also to challenge myself to work within tight deadline, but either way I'll jump in anyway. I'll whip myself if I have to.

So here's the result of the first 5 lashes...

^{DONT LAF!}

I decided to start with the mischievous character, and he is a jester. A demonic, twisted jester with a maniacal laugh and evil jokes and tricks.

That's because I've been wanting to make a jester character lately, and I thought it's a good idea to start where my best interest lies. Though that's a very rough sketch and only one perspective, it does get the juice to flow better. Here's the keywords for the whole characters.

^{I find actually moving your hand to write rather than to type feels different. But still couldn't bring myself to write the whole backstory}

The title for my submission is called The Damned Throne Room. The story behind the characters is a story of betrayal in the kingdom. Specifically, as the name suggests, within the throne room. Hence the list of the chosen characters. It says one of the ideas is "villains", but it's actually more of heroes turned villains in the unfortunate circumstances rather than a group of evil created for the sake of being evil.

Did the jester kill the king? What was his motives? What sort of conflict within the throne room did this jester get himself into? Or perhaps they are cursed by the true evil being behind the curtain? Who is the real traitor to the crown?

Possible story writing will possibly, very possibly come after I finish the challenge, so... who wants to read my newbie broken engrish fiction again? Yaaay! ^Anyone? ^{^No?}^{^{^{Just me?}}}

First Iterations

^{He looked ridiculous with that WWE belt-looking thing I deleted it twice}

This is the first iteration of the Jester and a little progress of how he got there, quite different from my awkward sketch as you can see, but still followed the general guidelines from it... if there was any guideline at all.

I wanted to make him look as creepy as I can without crossing the border into SCP-ish type of nightmare.

I know this one is still a very rough WIP, but when I imagined its final look he'll look just like any other jester. So, I decided to undertake this experiment and made him look like the...

Second Iterations

This was the first design idea of the second iteration. I couldn't get the idea of "a face should be on the head!" out of my head so I couldn't get ahead... head. So I kept it that way.

Butt! I find it kind of a bad design decision because:

It makes the face on his torso looks shoehorned there.
It's forcing the viewer to be able to move each of their eyes to different directions like a chameleon in order to divide their attention to two main focuses.

I mean, I'm not saying I'm excluding chameleons from viewing my work here, but--

I fixed it by making the mask on his head to look a lot simpler so everyone's happy.

At first I was worried if this look strayed too far from being mischievous despite my fascination towards this idea more, but thanks to the cool peeps at ArtBees for the feedbacks, I'm certain this will look more interesting.

He's more demonic, nightmarish, unpredictable, and seems like the punchline of his jokes will end up in blood.

And he's also more mysterious! Is the creepy face on his torso his real face? What happened to his face face? Is it alive? His shirt is alive? Or is it just a prop? Who knows. And I have plans to make his humanly arms look less like a normal human.

^{All view}

This is the final look of the second iteration, which will likely make it to the final result. More things will be added as it's not final because sculpting is not the only process in 3D modelling, you know? You think the computer does all the things for you?! Fight me biotch I'll beat you up with my broken mouse!!1!11!!1

Anyway, that's pretty much the main things that I have in mind for this one. I'm pretty excited about this contest, especially knowing that my tablet will arrive soon, so wish me luck!

If you have any questions, feedbacks, criticism, etc, feel free to leave them in the comment section below. But don't leave your chameleon eyeballs there, I don't want that.