Beidou is our favorite pirate queen. So she needed to look like the queen of pirates that she is. Her outfit didn't really say pirate to me, and there were features in her outfit I wasn't a fan of, like the torso area and the shorts. There's something with the shorts I realized with Mihoyo.
Redesign notes:
I I don't know if anyone can see the concept art, but I was trying to get figure out how to adjust the outfit. I decided to go for poofy sleeves as that was both in pirate and Chinese fashion. My biggest concern was losing the cultural features in the process of being more pirate like. I got the idea as well from other redesigns and Time Princess's Taking Root outfit concept art.
I got the idea to give her a red coat, thanks to the tail coat feature she has on her. I gave her white pants to contrast the colors to get more balance and some blue on the tassels (as well as more tassels) and the cape. For the blue, I got the idea from her talents (it had names like "tidebreaker" or "ocean " and that made me think of blue). I really liked how the cape came out with the cloud collar. It's like the sky or ocean behind her. I also gave some golden ropes around her waist, and this was not planned until I started coloring, but I also added pearls for a pirate vibe.
Some of the things that stayed the same were the boots, gloves, brown belt, makeup, eye patch, and hair pin. (For the gloves, she still has that anchor symbol. It was just hard to fit it in).
I did make a small change to her hair, giving her a high bun instead because it was hard to draw the original and make it align with the hair pin.
Speaking of the hair pin, I moved her vision inside the pin. Trying to be more creative here. For the torso area, I made it a solid black with silver pins on it from the original design.
Originally, I was gonna make the sleeves red, but while i was coloring it, I noticed how the white balanced the colors nicely. So, I decided to leave it and continue with the rest of the colors to see how it looks. Personally, I'm happy with that last-minute decision.
The outfit wasn't the only thing that was changed. This is the first redesign where I changed the weapon. The original had a lot of red and black (which Beidou already had), and it didn't look pirate like to me either. In fact, I actually did concept art for the sword, drawing the original so I can be familiar with it and did research on Chinese swords like Dao and Dadao swords.
I went to her gallery on the wiki and got the idea to use her anchor symbol as the handle of the sword.
Also, I made her tan because I saw in someone else's Beidou redesign(artist name is SayuIsntATanuki from HoyoLab), and they explained how it can be from being out in the sun and sailing. Honestly, I feel that makes senses.(Note: Here is the link to that person's redesign https://m.hoyolab.com/#/article/26536753 )
Actually, this is not the first time I have redesigned Beidou. I actually redesigned her back in 2023, so two years ago, and she was my first Liyue redesign before Ganyu.
The first redesign was closer to the original, but I messed up on the pants and made it black, which I didn't like, so I erased it to white but didn't work out 😅. Also, I tend to make the head bigger than the rest of the body 😅😅.
This was before I started concept arts and tried to improve more. Honestly, looking at this redesign from before to now, I'm really proud of the progress I made.🥰
