If any of you are interested in making another long behind the scenes yap for one of these characters, might I suggest Eridan? I just really like his design
yo
this was the original sketch i had done while we were doing beta troll concept art. his design changed a bit between then and now.
mostly i simplified his stupidly shape glasses to only feature one color instead of two, and decided not to give him bi-color eye shadow. it was just too much going on.
i don't remember the exact design philosophy i had going into Eridan... for most of the beta trolls, i started with the horns, trying to match them with their signs. Gemrius is the Hope+Derse gold sign that he ended up with, so i gave him those weird dual curved horns to match it. (funnily enough, Gemrius looks almost exactly like Pipia, the Derse+Light fuchsia sign. i wonder what horns for that sign would look like?) oh yeah, he also shares his sign with Cirava Hermod. there was bound to be some overlap with a few of those hiveswap trolls. Tyzias and Remele come to mind.
speaking of, i also remember looking at a lot of the hiveswap friendsim trolls while doing the trolls. the wiki has a page for each blood caste and they all have a list of members, so it worked well for getting a good look at the shared traits within each caste. Eridan proved difficult because almost all the golds we know of have those neon color-no pupil eyes. The only exceptions being Zebede and a background troll from the train.
from that i guessed that most golds have that neon eye gene, but not all of them. i'm not sure if it directly correlates to a gold having psionics... but i did take that into account when i gave Eridan the eyes he has.
Eridan doesn't have psionics, but believes that one day he'll unlock them. i gave him these weird neon-with-pupil eyes to visually nod at that. maybe his strange eyes *are* because his powers are latent? or maybe it means nothing and he just has weird freak eyes. either way, he's not shooting lasers out of his eyes anytime soon.
i don't remember what possessed me to give him his silly outfit, just that we didn't want the trolls in the upper end of the lower castes (so Eridan, Feferi, Karkat, and Vriska) to look *too* fancy or colorful. this is 100% the nicest thing he owns. mostly i think i just wanted him to look like he's trying to make you think he's cooler than he actually is.
i also can't talk about eridan without mentioning his god awful terrible to look at quirk.
CA: {a wizard's job is to vex c#ummps quickly inn fog;}
look at it. look at this beast on my floor.
this one was a group effort between us and the discord chat during a stream there. it's his original ww vv but flipped upside-down to be mm nn, H's become # because his sign looks like a #, and he always replaces full-stops with ; because he's never done talking. the reason it's always in {} because someone said, and i quote, "eridan looks like a curly bracket." i think they must've meant his horns???????? the reason he has so much going on is because canon Sollux has so much going on with his quirk.
one final design note to give about Eridan is actually about his gun. i called it the B.B. Gun Mk.II, but it's actually just a gun from the anime Symphogear (i couldn't find an image of her *actually using it* from the show, but i was able to find pictures of her goodsmile figure where she has them so just trust me on this).
funny enough, this was before i had watched the show, roxy just slid this sick 3d model someone made of it to me as reference and i went "oh boy! anime gun for the anime guy!" i guess he must have alchemized a pistol with some merch of Troll Chris Yukine from Troll Symphogear? i like to think that's a show Eridan and Feferi would both like.
welp, that's all from me on Eridan. i hope this was actually interesting and not just mindnumbing rambling. ^^;
-HCZ