26 Monkeys Concept Art

I had a week to design two characters from the short story, "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss" by Kij Johnson. In the end, this was the result.
I started with reading the story itself and writing down any key descriptors of the characters, as I am prone to not remembering things like that on my own. Afterwards, I read it again just to see if I missed anything. I then went to put together a moodboard of anything that I felt related to the characters. These things ranged from what species they were, what they wore, what their occupation was, etc. After I had those figured out, I went straight to my sketchbook and drew nothing but variations of those characters for the next few days.
Aimee is the main character of the story, and the most we get is that she's a forty-something year old woman who has this extravagant magic act with, you guessed it, 26 Monkeys. We really only get descriptors of her clothing and general emotional turmoil throughout the story, which is, "A purple-black sparkly dress akin to a skimpy magicians outfit", and that she is often depressed, at least when she bought the monkeys.
When I was reading the book, I immediately thought of her as a black woman, and so I designed her as such. I originally envisioned her with a sort of cropped, longer on one side hairstyle, but the rounded floofs were easier to replicate and gave off a unique silhouette. I based a lot of her costume off of the skimpy magician description, but the purple dress I based off of costumes that I would wear back when I was in the performing arts, since Aimee is described as a performer. I mostly relied on her figure for the sexy factor, as leading lines accentuate her bust and legs.
Zeb was the hardest for me to design because I had never drawn a monkey before now, and so I had to start with a generalized anatomy lesson on the monkey that he is based off of, which is De Brazza's Monkey. The monkey itself is extremely furry, and tends to hold a lot of fat, so figuring out the bone structure was difficult. I solved this problem by looking at other species of monkeys within the same family, which was the guenon family. Zeb is described as an extremely old monkey with barely any hair left, and is senile. The De Brazza's monkey has a white patch of hair that resembles a beard, so I made sure to keep that characteristic with Zeb, as it was both a nod to his species and to his age. I also gave him a very cute, overly sagging face because I thought it fit more with his personality.
For the final illustration, I decided to base it on a scene in the end, where Aimee embraces Zeb in tears. The scene was the most memorable when I read it, and it definitely wrapped up the relationship of the two core characters in a pretty little bow.
Overall, this was a very fun project to partake in.