These are still WIPs and I want to further refine the vambrace buster concept before I get to coloring any of this, but I'm getting antsy sitting on all this unshared progress I've made with sorXa's armor design, so fuck it, I'm posting what I have so far!! I've more or less said "fuck it" and started leaning into the Χ/χ motif à la X (particularly his X8 design), though the besagew is actually also meant to evoke a clover, partly because sorXa's name is pronounced like the Irish way of saying "Sorcha" (which would make it a shamrock), but also largely because I'm nothing if not a huge MMZ dweeb and I love the lyrical version of MMZ2's credits theme from RTRZ: Idea, which is called... Clover. (the original song is Awakening Will, for reference, which itself is a reprise of the hypest intro stage theme I've ever fucking heard, Departure, which plays during what's also probably the most badass opening to a game I've ever seen. Zero 2 isn't my favorite in the series, but that intro goes so fucking hard!!... I think I got a bit off-topic here, haha)
Transcripts under the cut, since even if I'm not done yet I figure I might as well help people make out what I wrote if I'm posting these as WIPs:
Page 1 (sorXa armor concepts):
- gold rivets? (pointing to the forehead plate of her helm, accompanied by a sketch showing the positioning of the three rivets)
- speakers (pointing to the circles on her facemask)
- Megamix-style arms (next to her big bulky round forearm armor; this idea is altered in the third image to be more like Mega Man Volnutt from the Legends series)
Page 2 (sorXa armor concepts):
- mask can detach if lip-reading is needed for clearer communication (near her detached mask, which is connected to her helm by a tether on each side)
- ❌ no (next to a besagew shaped like a Phillips-head screw)
- sapphic! (next to a besagew with indents shaped like the violet used in some versions of the Sapphic pride flag)
- Clover + "Χ" (next to a variant of the previous besagew with only 4 indents; an arrow points from the Sapphic violet besagew to the clover besagew)
- historical! (next to a besagew with a shallow cone in the center of a bowl-like rim)
- gold or red ring? (pointing to a variant of the above besagew with a lighter-colored ring around the central cone)
- maybe only 1? → R or L? (above a small mockup of sorXa's torso with only one besagew; "L" is circled, which is reflected by the first page's design of her armor)
Page 3 (sorXa armor concepts (buster cannon)):
- vents on top | slides up & out (pointing to a raised part of her vambrace, which is now more cylindrical than the previous images)
- thruster (pointing at jetpack-like structures on the back of her cuirass; note that these will be revised in a future drawing, probably)
- (duplicated at the back of her calf, which also has a visible jet of sorts)
- [various color ideas for her boots] (the poleyns will probably be gold with red "fan plates"/hinges, which will be replicated on her ankle adornments as well; the calves themselves are black (of course), and the notes show her boots as having white outsoles and red soles, though I think I might reverse that in practice)
- 4 holes (pointing to the beveled edge of her vambrace hear the wrist, accompanied by a simple drawing showing roughly the positioning of those holes, which are in an X-formation)
- Model A + Bridget (pointing at the bumpy protrusions on the outsoles of her boots, which are meant to evoke the boots of Model A from Mega Man ZX Advent and the shoes of Bridget's Guilty Gear Strive Design)