Gold Saint: Aries Helmet design 01

First pass at the front design for the Aries Helmet.  I had started working on it in color but I kept getting distracted so I just switched it up to gray scale.

Lately I've been getting back into Saint Seiya and it reignited my passion for the whole series from when I was a child.  "The Lost Canvas" and the more recent "Omega" series' also inspired me to do a redesign of the characters.

I'm not sure if I want to go along with the series' characters or go a different route and make new characters all together (I guess along with my own story as well?)

The Aries Saint seems to be a kind of "lineage" thing where the armor and title is passed down within the family or at least within the race of people so I wanted to keep him looking similar to the Aries we're all familiar with.  I need to play with different hair colors because, right now, I'm not diggin' the "pink" color... works fine in anime... not so much when you're trying to pull it towards realism.  Oh, right, I'm designing the characters as though they were to be made into a live action movie, so that'll play a big role in the armor designs.

Here are a couple of images of the series' Aries character:

The Daily Warm-Up

Today's Sketch

Warm-up face drawing, inspired by Michael Buffington [drawaholic.blogspot.com], my character drawing professor from AAU.  I try and time myself with these to see how far I can get in 1 hour (+ or -).  It's an exercise on speed and accuracy on anatomy and form.  I'm doing them with colored pencils but I think I'm going to switch over to graphite seeing as how the wax just wares out too fast.  I could do charcoal but it's way too messy and I don't want to get it all over the carpet. D:  Well, I have a whole box full of colored pencils, I suppose I'll switch out when they're all just stubs... but I digress.  My goal is to reach 1,000 head drawings in hopes of improving.  :D  (This is going to be one really long thread.)

Here are a few others I've done before this one.