Here is the wife. The left illustrates the low topology of the mesh. The right shows my first pass at texturing her. I would latter create a tattered rag texturefor her dress to make her look even more poverty stricken. Note how she appears extremely gaunt whilst the alchemist is fairly plump. I wonder who scoffs the food in this household?

Here is the Alchemist fully textured with stylish accessories.

I then attached the head to a low poly body. In hindsight I would have added a couple more edge loops to the body and arms as the low poly mesh resulted in some unsightly deformations whilst animating. I would solve these through ad hoc weight painting. The reason I went with such a low polygon count was to ensure I could work on my home computer without it crashing.

The Basic face mesh

I used the same base mesh as a starting point for all my characters as it had a good edge flow. This also saved a lot of time as I didn't have to create three faces from scratch.