Hibiki Design 01

This is Hibiki, or at least, my initial design for Hibiki's transformed state for 's webcomic. Yes, the main plot of the comic is that the main character, an average teenage boy, comes into contact with an artifact that transforms him into a magical girl.

Now, I'd just like to say a lot of effort went into designing this outfit. I did extensive research on magical girl outfits, digging through my childhood in the process and noticed a key difference between today's magical girls and yesteryear's. The most notable difference tends to be with presentation; yesteryear's girls tended to have simple outfits adorned with vibrant colours and accessorisation in the form of tassles, bows and maybe ruffles. Today's girls focus more on multiple layers of clothing, borrowing elements from gothic lolita and Victorian styles of clothing. I'd go so far as saying that Nanoha, of Magical Lyrical Girl Nanoha, just basically has a female version of Ky Kiske's outfit from Guilty Gear. The other thing was that yesteryear's girls, while a little more "skimpily" dressed, did have armour incorporated into their clothing. If you take a look at Sailor Moon, the Senshi all had chest plates and the Wedding Peach gals had armour that covered the upper torso and some had padded gloves as well.

So in short, I wanted to go with something oldschool because I personally found that more appealing and simplicity lent better to elegance than an overly complex outfit. The upper part of the outfit is actually armoured which lends to physical protection. I also wanted the outfit to have a basic motif or "theme", if you will, that people may notice on a subconcious level. This outfit here's basic theme centers around "wings". I didn't just want to outright go and draw wings on the outfit, but rather, have basic design elements within the outfit that could symbolise or convey the image of wings. This is because, as the story goes, Hibiki's powers represent love and goodness and, in my opinion, the generally universally accepted representative of those things would be angels. Angels have wings, blahblahblah, you get the idea.

I might do another in the future, but I think I may need to look into a slightly more complex design. This could easily be added to, or edited though, it's pretty much open to interpretation right now since it's a preliminary design. This outfit could easily also be one of many within the comic, as I'm sure that in line with other magical girl shows, there will be upgrades with different outfits. :3