coNCEPT aRT - mARIE bREEDER
Her name was original supposed to be spelled Mairi Vidar, but the more serious the story became, the more eager I was to change it to something more identifiable.
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I created Marie back in 2007 by combining the character designs of two of my favorite throw-away female leads from two shounen series I enjoyed and one lead female from a lesser known mecha series. Marie gets her color scheme from the anime version of Akari Fujisaki from Hikaru no go. I wrote a lot of spin off fan fiction for Akari back in High school, so naturally I wanted an original character that embodied my (extremely derailed) mental-model of her.
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Marie's story was originally supposed to be a school story about a girl, struggling to fit in, but the storyline never took off.
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These character design sheets were drawn during my last attempt of launching the school story. I had acquired Marie again, at the end of 2013, as a mascot for my art tumblr and I had hoped to feature her story on my blog as well.
I didn't intend to make Marie a maid until I started playing with the new revised concept of Ivy. It was in my draft notes that Ivy had hired her to be her friend and take care of her. Marie's military uniform was drawn long after the story was revised to take place in an MMORPG. I designed it from several inspirations. One of the main inspirations was Miku Hatsune's Love is War uniform.
Prior to livNPC's concept, Marie was always depicted as being domestic and cleanly, however I didn't expect to have her go in and out of jobs in cooking games, so these culinary uniforms were designed last minute. I wanted the bakery uniform to be pink and inviting, and the restaurante uniform to be stereotypical colors.
After meeting and befriending Shasta, I had intended for Marie to wear his scarf with her dresses, but I was always going back and forth on it. It adds to her femininity, but the black throws off her color scheme.
_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 Napoleon's Haunted Cannon. Oddly, I don't really like motifs like this, but I occasionally add things I don't like to my stories in order to keep them diverse. This costume was inspired by French Military Fashion, coupled with the ghostly chains of greed and selfishness as described by Charles Dickens in the Christmas Carol, when he introduces the Ghost of Jacob Marley. In Dicken's telling, Marley's chains are attached to all of his earthly vices (his love of money illustrated as metal cash boxes and such), so it felt appropriate to attach Marie's Napoleon to a cannon and a cannon ball. Here, Marie is wearing white tights and gloves, although it's hard to tell. During the coloring process, I wanted to make her undervest white, just like Napoleon's, but it threw off the balance of the costume. Her chains follow a complicated path around her figure and even I have trouble understanding the reference. |