I love the designs from the first wave of League's Battle Academia skinline and wanted to try my hand at designing some fan skins. I chose four champions I thought would make for an interesting “friend group” in this skinline's universe and created both outfit and weapon concepts for all of them. My goal was to stay faithful to the style and feeling of the original skinline, but bring in some unique design points as well to avoid the cut-and-paste feeling that can come with school uniform designs.

I started with some rough doodles to narrow down the champions I wanted. Instead of starting with the characters I decided to focus on the weapons, as they are one of my favourite parts of the skinline. I created an “inspiration board” to compile some references from existing skins and understand the theme's colours and shape language.

Then, since I definitely wanted to make a design for Aphelios, I created designs for his guns based on the references I'd collected. I also did the weapons for Sett and Seraphine, which brought the list of chosen characters up to three. I then ended up picking Samira as the final character since I found designing this style of weapons fun and Samira uses both guns and swords.

After finishing the weapon designs I created the first iteration of the outfits. I wanted one champion per each of the in-universe “clubs”, so I assigned the clubs to the character I thought suited them best.

As with the weapons, I created another board to reference the style of the original skinline for details such as pant seams and coloured linings. I then used my knowledge of sewing to try and design realistic outfits for the first two characters (Sett and Aphelios). The only exception is the “ties”, since in the in-game models they appear as part of the shirt instead of actual ties and I wanted to keep closer to the in-game models rather than the splashes or concept art.

I then moved on to the designs for Samira and Seraphine and finished turnaround sketches for all four of the characters.

One of my goals was to have all four champions resemble their in-game silhouettes, meaning restrictions such as Seraphine having long hair and Samira having pants. While I was working on the turnarounds, I realized that Sett was slightly overdesigned and that Aphelios did not match his in-game model. To fix this I simplified Sett's shirt and completely redid Aphelios with a new silhouette. I also studied Sett's silhouette to see how my design would align with his existing skins.

If this were part of a real design process it would be unwise for me to stop after only one or two iterations. This applies to all areas of design, and I think it's important to try and branch out to as many ideas as possible—even if you still end up settling on the first iteration, there is knowledge gained from the designs that didn't work.

With this in mind, I'm satisfied with these “skins” as they are now and think that I've created designs that would fit into the battle academia universe. My next steps with this project are 3D models of the character weapons, and you can check out my ray tracer writeup to see early versions of my models for Samira.