Concept Art - Ivy Lindell
Ivy's design was also partially inspired by Kanaria from Rozen Maiden, who is also one of my favorite characters.
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I created Ivy back in 2005. She was redesigned and brought back to be Marie's employer and best friend. I had originally intended this character to be obnoxious and have trouble making friends on her own, without having to resort to throwing around money, but all of those notes were trashed as livNPC underwent it's first revision. Ivy's eye style was revised to look as irritatingly cute as possible.
She was named after the Greek Cypriot singer Ήβη Αδάμου (Ivi Adamou), but because most people tend to mispronounce Ήβη (ee-vie) as Ivy, I decided to just name her Ivy anyway. I have a large collection of Ήβη's music, so I've come to think of Ivy as also being a musical character. I expected her Default weapon to be a violin, but I started leaning towards guitar-type instruments. |
This new version of Ivy was inspired by one of the accessory models from Modcloth. I like to look at vintage clothing to get inspiration. I wanted Ivy to have a very mature fashion sense to show that she's a woman, despite her appearance. On top of that, I also looked for inspiration from fashion dolls, to create the outfit on the left. Ivy also has some playful indoor clothing that give her a more childish vibe.
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Before we launched into vol03, my sister and I had trouble agreeing which color scheme looked better on Ivy's new outfit. She made the example on the right and I made the example on the left. I ended up going for the darker color scheme because it looked more mature, but the only trouble with choosing it was that, I ended up leaving out some of the details on her chest, solely because I couldn't see them on the printed reference.
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I don't remember at what point in the storyline I wanted to make alternate costumes for the characters, but I found myself plotting out these Magic Item Transformations and working them into the plot.
This is Techno Muse Ἀοιδή (Aoide). It was inspired by the Greek music I loved when I was fleshing out Ivy. Aoide was one of the three original muses, which later expanded to five muses and then nine muses. She was the muse of voice and song. Naturally my love for Eurovision motivated me to wire the costume with stage performance technology. Ivy is wearing a headset and the antenna is disguised as a long gold leaf. I had initially thought that leaves would be the main feature all over the outfit, but I exchanged them for flowers after seeing many beautiful yellow floral inspired wedding dresses. I was torn between her main weapon being a tambourine, ταμπουράς (Tambouras) or μπουζούκι (Bouzouki). |