Transcription project: Viking character story and silhouette doodling

I decided to create a character for a game after all. This decision will limit me on the possible detail and will make me to think more about how it could react in a real time game engine. The background of the character is that he is one of the last survivors in the battle of "Ragnarok" from the great hall of "Valhalla". "Valhalla" is a place where Odin prepared special warriors to participate in this battle of "Ragnarok" on behalf of his side and "Ragnarok" is the last battle where all gods where predicted to die. This character will have to clearly reflect its origin, but still stay original and interesting. The type of game for this character would be a non-linear narrative based role playing game. Having these facts in my mind I started doodling some characters. Most of them are just different variations of the same characters, but left alone older versions just leaves some space to think if I could push that character to a different direction. Since the most important thing for a game character is his silhouette it is a must to begin sketching it from it, because most of the in the game it is not going to take the whole screen so you are supposed to recognize it even fro far away and it should tell a lot about it.

I also found some nice Celtic tribal drawings that could work with my character well as a reference for the armor carvings and clothing patterns from a book of "Contemporary celtic motifs" by Alex Sherman.This book even have the templates and examples how to do your own Celtic drawings. Here are few examples: