When looking for a subject to work from, it came to me that I had not done anything with Samurai, so I sought to rectify that. I started with this image that I found on a Martial Arts forum. It seemed to be an authentic image of a real samurai and I loved the colors so it was a good starting point.
(Credit Unknown)
I took that image into Adobe Ideas on my iPad mini and set to work at finding the overall shapes. This used a few layers and simplified shadows to make it a basic outline of what I wanted. I knew that ultimately I wanted to simplify the look, but blob shapes were a good start.
This is my final. After bringing the .idea file into Illustrator, I found the basic shapes I wanted from the original lines used a simplify pass on it then corrected the placement of the lines from that. I then took stock textures and did a few modifications to the colors of them and dropped them as a new fill on each section of colors.
I am happy with the results and will likely make a few more in this series.
This is the original of my second simplified samurai. I pulled it down from a search within Adobe Idea (a feature I hadn't used before this)
Here is my overdrawing in Adobe ideas. Again, it's mainly to find the shapes of the shadows and highlights.
This is my simplified and textured shapes in Illustrator.