Hooo boi, here comes a longie.
First of all, thankies for the compliments -insert Nox shy butt hiding behind some blankets-. And yea, I got ya on that, I actually went fom a variety of designs for these characters that have evolved over the course of three to four years. And their fist designs were kinda a thingy to decide at first.
for example this thing, it is... like back from when I was in late school, before graduating. There they had a relative design that was rather simplistic and fitted the artstyle of the initial panels of introduction. as well as a more cartoon-ish style. that I’ve developed into a more realistic one.
Yep! I did take a bunch of references, which in my red mage are clearly visible along the Orange and purple. In fact, most of the aesthetics and world I did for these guys have a particular influence: The movie adaptations of Tolkien’s sagas of Arda Lotr and The Hobbit. From the Rohirim Theoden’s armor to the dwarven ones. And a tad of elven motif too along some Rightwraith. I also took a tad of inspiration from the fanfic-like games of Middle-Earth: SOM and SOW.
I also took refences from skyrim to make secondary attires for them, since, ya know, they can’t be on armor constantly around, can’t they? So I took mage clothes and picked a few dets I found I liked and mixed it with some other reference like Warcraft and again Lotr. as well as 14th to 17th century armors. along clothings from different ages, heck I even still have some of the references that influenced the clothings inside my folders too. And the rest was me trying to balance it out between showing the influences and also making it seem somewhat original. Something that likely will change in a pair of years if I still have them. Since I too write stories with them with a bit of visual aid with other people.
here are some Wip’s of the same two mages, you can tell a tad the WoW and Skyrim influece on their attires now.
One thing you can do, but is not necessary, is to ask yourself of their personalities, it can help picturing an image of their shapes, and the motifs of their designs. It is not necessary, but it does help sometimes. As for what to search and how? You can make an account on pinterest and search for mages or armor, or go around Tumblr, Google and DA to search for inspirations or references. You can use darksiders, you can use Warcraft, lort, the hobbit, middle earth, Dungeons and dragons, as in neverwinter, Lort online, Dungeons and dragons books that have illustrations, etc, you can also search for classical attire or armor plates, the thing’s not empty, etc.
As for poses and studd, well, there are a bunch of pages than can help ya with that, ‘n stuff.
I’ll try to write this again tho, since I am a tad messy sice it’s late while I write this, but I hope I can make some sense in here to help ya a bit. And if you’re still a tad complicated you can send me a pm and I’ll try to make a bit of time between exams to help ya with designing them.