Progression of ideas and finalizing of characters

Recently i have neglected to keep this blog updated, so this is going to be quite long im afraid.

Continuing on from my last journal, i continued sketching in my sketchbook, working mainly on the main character, developing his appearance by looking at his attire, weaponry, turnaround illustrations, his appearance in different media (such as traditional inks and digital brushes), as well as color experimentations using inks on print outs of his final line art. 

I decided on developing the final design of this character, and the rest, digitally so that the process could be completed quicker and give me more room to improvise if i make any mistakes (which would be near impossible to correct if i did the final thing using inks or paints). So i basically inked over the original pencil line-art, then scanned this into Photoshop where i colored it using a combination of layer effects and brushes, using a drawing tablet to give it a more natural looking style.
Also, after talking to my class mates they agreed to let me base my characters off them. This will make it easier to come up with each character faster with a facial reference, I just have to worry about designing unique attire to match. To get a good idea of face characteristics and also to simplify each persons features down to their simplest form (which will greatly help when I re-draw each one), i created a rough trace in photoshop using a reference pic for the base layer. Here are the ones I did below:

The characters are based off the following people (listed from top to bottom):

Andrew Cheetham ~Yoshitsune

Julie Kimmel ~ Princess Onin

Ami-Lea Doran ~ Lady Tomoe

Katy Underwood ~ Gio

Matthew Cook ~ Yoichi

Wakeel Khan ~ Emperor Kiyomori