Any tips on making such unique OC designs? I've seen you post a whole bunch of designs, most of them turtle or turtle-adjacent, and I'm really curious about it! Most of the tmnt OCs ive seen just look like the canon 4 boys with slightly different marking shapes or colors (or a straight copy paste with a different mask color) and it's drawn me away from most TMNT OCs because the creators will get huffy whenever someone mistakes their OC for a canon character even if they look almost exactly alike
I've struggled with designs too when I make multiple OCs with similar species, as head shapes and colorations are fairly limited when looking at real life examples and references
I would say don’t be afraid to try something out only for it not to work?
I apologize in advance for my poor grammar
I don’t know too much what goes through my head but I do know with let’s say Nico she has about 5 previous designs before the one she had now.
This was Nico’s FIRST design
And then these two came after. I’m only showing 3 right now because my camera roll is a mess he i can’t find the other 2… but either way, even when I had Nico’s colors basically down I still made major changes
Something I thought of when making her was “I want her to be read easily as a turtle but with minor differences that set them apart” such as her twin tails, four fingers, odd coloration, and little chin things! Those might be a lot but in the end she still reads like a turtle
And here’s some more turtle examples
Jacki and his brothers. Nothing special going on with them but I based them off horse coats. That’s it, that’s what made them special
Of course all of those are my oc’s that are kappa so I leaned into the unrealistic
Here are some non turtle characters (minus Riku plus one)
The third character being a Burmese roofed turtle, I’d share photos but I have no more photos left… if you search it up and look at her you’ll see I took parts that were interesting, like the red I saw around their eyes in a photo or two and exaggerated it
With the first one she’s a leopard gecko which I think she looks pretty accurate to one? so in this case I didn’t go too deep into exploring but there was still some playing around I had to do
Second one is a snake, specifically an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake which he looks nothing like!!! Cause guess what? I didn’t use a reference, I had a slight idea of color to keep it down to earth, and had fun. Still need to make him more accurate but the point here is I had fun first. But for his clothes I didn’t use Pinterest to look at sole examples of cowboys and from they’re had fun as well
And then Riku, the third one is a pink bellied side neck turtle, which to be fair he’s got some mystic bullshit going on but there is still something to be learned her I think
I can’t go into depth about everything I thought of when making these characters… I really just tried whatever came to mind, kept things on many layers to help make things easy to get rid of, and fucked around and found out
Sorry… but I do hope this helps?
