For my characters, they started out very similar to how they ended up, with a few cosmetic changes. Savina was the first character of the universe that I designed, and at that point she had a tail and glowing spell tattoos, and differences in her face. Most of the changes I made to her were to simplify things. Same with Nira.
Original designs:
Current designs:
If I'm designing other things like armor or fashion or vehicles, I'll do brainstorming sheets during my concepting phase. I just play around with shapes and silhouettes, and don't go into too much detail. I don't think too deep about what fits the character at this point, cause then I get stuck in a loop of rejecting ideas and it stunts my progress. At the end I'll go back and pick out elements that I think fit into the design well, and from that come up with a cohesive final design. These are a few from my angel design process:
Concept sheets:
Final:
This has the added benefit of giving me more material for designs down the road. When I come up with angel designs for different tiers of angels later down the road, I'll probably pull some ideas from these sheets I've already done.
For less important stuff I might do sheets, to get it out of the way, or if it's something like a city, I'll just establish a design language to keep it all cohesive and doodle it directly into the panels on the day without any concept art at all. Hell there are a couple central set pieces in Issue 3 that didn't have concept work done, I just designed it directly into the comic.
