"Time. To not think about it! He reaffirms with a smile."
Weehee!! Chapter 4!!! This is the second to last chapter of Act 1!
And now since this chapter doesn’t have any art in it, I get to yap abt my character design decisions!! And yap I shall because guess what. guys. I’m bad at color pallets ToT. I’m so bad at them. Unbelievably so, I need to redo all of my ocs colors fr. BUT doing color pallets for all the isat characters IS really good practice! So!! This is Sif’s!!!
They’re the main character so they get two refs :3
The first one is a newer ref, made so I could keep track of the design changes and colors. And the second one is more of a concept art-y thing, originally on the same canvas as a bunch of other concept art I made for the au!
Below the cut to hear me yappin abt it:
God I’ve been waiting for so long to talk about this. The biggest debate I had with myself (and am still having with myself, I honestly might change it even now) was whether to make Sif’s hair sort of an albino blond type deal, or pure platinum white. I’ve had so many arguments with myself about this, going back and forth between everything from ‘the color palette looks too samey if his hat, cloak, and hair are all pure white’, to ‘the white hair is an important racialized feature that shouldn’t be ignored’, and ‘well yes but it can still be that, only I think blond is more realistic?’, and ‘but wait some of the people in the games I’m gonna put him in have pure white hair so doesn’t that cancel it out?’ to ‘I’ve always thought that if I did make a color palette for Sif I’d make his hair light blond, both because it felt right and because I think in the very first color palette I saw for him he had blond hair?’, and, of course, to ‘buuut it also connects to [REDACTED] which is really important and might honestly be the main reason I want to make it blond’ WHICH I CAN’T EVEN EXPLAIN YET BECAUSE THAT IS SPOILERS, soooooooooo I still don’t even know what’s right at this point, gang. I don’t fucking know. okay. I got no damn idea. Right now it’s veryvery light blond, but like I said that could change?? I don’t know??? Maybe I’ll do a whole big retcon sesh someday and make it white. But for now, this is the palette.
ANYWAYS!
A fun thing I wanted to do for this was to try and match the colors as closely as I could to their shade counterparts (because I silly and I want it to be canon divergence au and all that so theoretically canonically based :3)---and you can let me know how I did, but the part I’m most proud of is the eye. I wanted to make it look like one solid shade when put into grayscale, when in reality it’s four different colors. (Why is it four different colors you ask? ...because I couldn’t decide between them. okay. shush.) So you can, say, put a color layer over the whole thing, and have ‘im look (almost) just like they do in canon! Voila:
I tried to match the shade for the underside of the hat and everything. Sif’s easy in a way for the whole shade-matching thing cause they’re mostly just black and white, everyone else is gonna be the real challenge, but this was a good warmup to see what I can really do with this method!! I like the limitation, too. It mostly solves the usual problem I have with trying to come up with colors for a character, which is contrast.
I did lighten the hair for the ref ref (the above), removing the teensy bit of darkening I did around the edges for contrast in the first one, so it looks a bit brighter in this one. Quite very almost pure white but juuust not quite (wow rhymes!). This one is more accurate in general as to what their design is for the actual fic, since as you can see it has spoilers in it that I hadn’t cooked up when I was first concepting the thing (teehee), but I’m sharing both because I love a good concept-ideas-working-stuff-out piece and you can’t stop me!!
