After delving into Vignar's lore yesterday, it got me thinking about other characters with Companions ties. There are four other characters in the vanilla world who were formerly attached the group. Specifically, according to the wiki:

Askar is a dialogue-only character who does not appear in person, and Hestla seems to have abjured her ties, which makes her a lower priority for customization. Arnbjorn though is one that I definitely need to give some thought to - but I can defer him until I decide to focus on the Dark Brotherhood. That does however leave Uthgerd, who I'd already been planning on customizing. She's kind of an interesting case; on one hand, she isn't actually a Companion and wasn't a member for long so I don't want to lean on Wolf armor at all. On the other hand, she was clearly a contender for membership and likely belongs to the 'berzerker' school of combat. If nothing else, her aggression that got her in trouble is a strong indicator of that. I'd like for her custom look to bestride that line a bit. She's also a two-handed weapon wielder, so like Farkas her main armor protection will be on the left side rather than the right.

My first inclination was to use some parts from the Practical Pirate outfit for her, but I quickly ran into a technical blocker that I didn't really want to deal with - that outfit is all a single mesh and doesn't have individual parts that I can trim back. Going in and painstakingly deleting vertices just doesn't sound work the time and effort.

Since that won't work, I need to regroup and think about what I want. The armor parts are pretty easy to envision. Shoulder protection on both sides, at least the left hip and maybe the left leg protected. The whole left arm protected. She'll also need a belt. If she has clothes, they'll be light - she's a Nord anyway and the berzerker armor profile skews towards the bikini side of things. Let's take a quick look at the Shinshi bodyslides and see if any good options jump out at us.

Farm Clothes 2 has some potential, so we'll start with that I think.

In the end I ended up dumping the farm clothes and ended up with this:

Let's see how she looks in game (with a custom skin of course - the BI Phenotypes "barbarian" skin in this case)

I think we pretty much got it right on the first try! I did forget to delete her breast bones, so I'll do that before I wrap up, but generally this is looking great. 

That'll be it for today - this was just a quick detour to fiddle around with a character that I kept thinking about overhauling but didn't - until today - have really clear vision for. We'll get back to our Companions members next time!