I saved out another stepped progression for an evil gnome I designed for my game. This time, I started with a page of silhouettes. Ordinarily, I would have pushed the silhouettes for more dynamic, active poses but, for purposes of the game, I am creating cards to be used in game-play and find that a more general neutral pose is better suited to those. I pulled some reference for the poses and worked up silhouettes with a rough, textured brush, leaving some room for happy accidents that could be read as accessories or elements of clothing. I tried a few different brushes here and ended up choosing one with a less opaque feel. I hear some artists say they like keeping everything solid black in these but I like keeping some variation in the values as it can suggest things within the form, possibly folds in cloth, items, sometimes even faces as one of these did. One of the other great things about starting with a rough silhouette like this is you have the opportunity to get in there and scale and distort the form to suit your needs. This is something I will play with well into the design.