ANIME GIRL ARCHETYPE (REDESIGNS)

A friend and I were commissioned back in 2022 to create mascot characters, specifically different types of anime girls, for his snack brand. This project was ultimately scrapped, however, I was particularly fond of the designs and hidden references in each design. I was responsible to design four different types of characters: vampire, cat girl, magical girl, and a witch. Four years later, I’ve decided to explore and re-design these characters but with the mindset of, “how does this design tie this character to her environment” and “how do I deviate from previous designs of each character archetype?”

MAGICAL GIRL

I’m a huge fan of the magical girl genre, having grown up on series like Tokyo Mew Mew, Mermaid Melody, and Magical DoReMi. I wanted to design a girl that borrowed heavily from early shoujo protagonist designs but also have a look familiar to the modern day renditions of the series’ lead (Madoka Magica). This design was probably the most difficult then and her design started to merge into a angel-type look. My current version leans heavily on the angelic like appearance, even adding in multiple eyes to her wings.

SEA WITCH

There are a lot of anime girl witch designs but very few that I know of that are particularly a sea witch. This idea was partially born out of the request for tentacles to be used for one of the characters. The other part of it was I wanted to try a riskier character design. In the end, her overall original appearance lacked the sinister and intimidating look I was aiming for. In the 2026 re-design, my goal was to make her look like the type of boss character you’d run into in the underwater level. Clothing wise, she remained pretty much the same with most of the edits being her hair and accessories. Her hair is meant to mimic tentacles with each section curved outwards. Her accessories are all made to look like things she would find at the bottom of the sea. My favorite element to design was her hands. While they are webbed, I wanted her to have some kind of weapon and ended up referencing Kurapika from Hunter x Hunter chain rings.