I designed the character with my current modelling skills in mind, but with a desire to give it some style and a warm, cartoon-ish feel. I also wanted the hair to have a chunky, plastic-y look to it so I divided it into three sections and thought about how it would sit on the head. I ended up changing the clothes after watching 'Wednesday' and wanting to make something a bit spooky!
When it came to modeling, my biggest challenges were the hair and the face. The face was finickity to get it looking smooth yet defined, I remade the head a total of 9 times!! Having the edge loops in the right places really helped, and I used a few references to help with this.
The hair I used a combination of modelling and a bump map, as you can see in this clay render, to get the look I was after. When it came to the lighting I had a lot of issues with noise, which I mostly solved by upping the samples on the emission from the lamp glow, and utilising Octane's AI denoiser (but not too heavily as otherwise I would lose detail on the dress material and the glass of the lantern).
Rigging was certainly a learning experience, and whilst it was enough to do some basic animation I think my next project will be making a new character with a full and flexible rig for animation, with all the knowledge applied from making this one!