re: your tags on that one post, as an artist myself, my personal character making process usually goes 1) 'oh i just thought of a really cool character design!' 2) somehow i come up with a personality to go this design 3) 'OH NO IM ATTACHED NOW I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING WITH THEM QUICK COME UP WITH A NAME/STORY' (that said, there's a different process when i'm trying to create characters for a specific purpose, eg to fill a spot in a story i'm working on, tho the name is... usually still last)
Hmm, yeah. I see! I mean, obviously the step that fails to connect for me is right at the start, where having a visual idea of how someone looks occurs separately from the rest of the idea of a person, yet the idea is still full of detail and interest. For me that would just be...a phantom.
It might put me on the trail of a real idea, be inspirational or something, but it’s very unlikely it would ever be enough of an anything to count as an idea, unless the visual impression immediately gathered around itself a whole conceptual network of person-who-is-like-this-came-from-this-wants-that-thing-broke-X-person’s-heart-rescued-a-goat, or whatever.
Even then, I’d probably have trouble distinguishing the ‘look’ part of the idea from the spatial sense of it, the moves-like-this.
(I...don’t have a very strong visual imagination. If you look at stuff I’ve drawn, the gap between ‘had a reference’ and ‘did not have a reference’ is even broader than normal. I’m also moderately face-blind. There’s...probably a link there.)
So I understand that this part is a Brains Differently thing; I can’t relate, but it isn’t confusing.
On the other hand, if I do start with an image of someone--if I’ve doodled a person absently in order to fit detail around a pose, or am fleshing out a random canon bystander for a fic, or someone handed me a photo and said ‘go,’ that’s a...shortcut, I guess. A boost. It makes everything else about the design process easier.
Because the opportunity to work from the outside in, with certain prerequisites outlined, means both that you’ve got a head start and that whatever decisions you make from this point on are bounded by facts you aren’t immediately responsible for, and can’t or at least probably won’t consider changing. It gives a foundation.
(This is why fic is so much easier for me than original work, both on a practical and--more importantly--emotional level.)
So I do understand that different things come easily to different people, but on some level I keep feeling like, if you start out with a detailed ‘look’ of the person, if your brain has already sorted out that much, shouldn’t they be easy to design from there? Since you already know so much about them, and can like...point at a jewelry or a scar or a color and say, ‘why?’ and boom, more facts now exist. Isn’t much of the work already complete and laying a blueprint for the rest?
And I mean, you can’t have designed an outfit without some preliminary determinations about the setting, because material and symbolic culture and very likely some interaction with gender norms, so there’s some assumed context available, too.
Like, yeah, obviously it’s different if you’re creating someone to fill a role versus creating them and figuring out as you go who they are and what their situation is. But I can’t break the decisions they made about their look apart from their personality, or the things they didn’t get to decide about their appearance from their backstory, and their backstory and choices are already at least halfway to a story about them.
(Not necessarily one with a plot worth writing on its own, admittedly, but a story nonetheless.)
So having these be framed as distinct creative stages which can each be completed before the next one’s begun is alien enough to me that I know we’re approaching this differently even though ‘somehow’ and ‘oh no quick’ don’t give me a lot of insight into the mysterious parts of your process. 😅
If one already has the character’s full visual design, so much information is already baked-in, and...I can see that being a problem if it’s too much information and you can’t make anything you like fit all the data...hm....
But that’s probably not exactly what’s happening, either. 🤷♀️
