Concept to Completion Comparison - Sprites

Spoilers abound! =O

So these are some sprites from Changeling! Beta testers know what is going on with the madness above. Others are likely curious as to what the heck is happening with these ladies. LoL

These sprites are from Ewan's route and a sequence at the end which involves some impostors of some of the other characters showing up.

I'll just go through them one by one to talk about the sprites individually, left to right. But first, some changes I made across the board:

Simplifying: All the costumes are a little busy and to cut down on the time needed to detail, and just reduce the visual clutter, I removed a lot of the details.

Skin Tone: For all the "impostor" concepts, the concept artist made the skin tones much paler. I just didn't like the idea of lightening everyone's skin, so I ditched that idea and decided to keep everyone's skin tone the same as their original sprite.

Markings: For Shelly and Ally (and some of the others I haven't finished yet), the concept artist gave them those dark markings on their faces. I didn't particularly like how it looked on some of the characters - Ally in particularly - and it didn't match what I had done with the other Faeries in the game. So I largely tossed that idea as well.

Eye color: I decided to keep all the eye colors in the blue/green range of things

Ally: The concept changed her hairstyle, skin tone, outfit, eye color, etc. I ended up keeping her original hairstyle and just recolored it to that pale green/white-ish color. I also simplified her outfit significantly, and got rid of the vine look. This was, in part, to avoid having to shade all those little leaves, but also because the vine motif really served no purpose and isn't at all relevant to the character or scene. And, as I mentioned above, I didn't change her skin tone at all. 

Shelly: Lots of toning down visual noise for her. She has feathers sticking out everywhere, leaves, wrappings with little knobs on it...And lots of bits of skin showing here and there. I reduced the amount of skin showing, and just largely tried to tone down the outfit. She also has this weird jungle-vibe to me that I didn't feel was a good fit for the scene either. I did keep the idea of her having that feather mantle, but I gave it a more subdued shape as opposed to having it stick out everywhere. I did keep the idea of skin markings for her, but made them fainter and less distracting. I also kept her hairstyle more in line with the original hair for this character (with slight changes).

Brenna: I ended up not saving a completed version of this sprite on my machine so this one is lacking the shading in the flowers. Like with the other characters, I simplified the outfit a bit by getting rid of some of the silver dangling bits. I also tried to make the silver parts of the dress less chunky and more delicate. I left out the wings for several reasons - but mostly just due to not wanting to deal with a very horizontally wide sprite. And, again, I elected to leave the skin tone as it was.

So yeah, that's about it. I'll show another concept/completion comparison for the other three impostor sprites once they're done as well!