What's your thought process behind making a character? And what helps you make one? (How you pick their sources, make their designs, and write their lore, etc). Character designing isn't the easiest for everyone but all your designs and characters seem so amazing.
THANK YOU FOR THE ASK AND YOUR KIND WORDS!! UWAHHH IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY THAT SOMEONE IS INTERESTED IN MY CHARACTER CREATION AND IS CURIOUS ABOUT MY PROCESS...!!
OKAY . THIS IS ABOUT TO BE A REALLY LONG POST AND NOT A LOT OF IT WILL BE SUPER CLEAR CUT SINCE MAKING CHARACTERS IS SUBJECTIVE! BUT !!!
a lot of the time the first concept is based off of media, whether that's a book, song, or individual character i really like the vibe of (I KNOW THIS IS EXTREMELY VAGUE BUT THAT'S REALLY ALL IT TAKES TBH)
it'll be a lot easier for me to explain my thought process behind creating my two world of darkness characters that are connected: my werewolf and hunter characters (that being said i'd prefer if the players for wta didn't read this bc of spoilers... but... i can't stop anyone anyways)
i'll start with the character that was created first !! harvest ! (2nd pic is current ref, 3rd is initial character draft)
a lot of the time i do a half body draft just to get the upper part down for vibes and decide what the bottom looks like with a 2nd draft (or i do it on the side) (this does have the problem of being extremely top heavy, but i mean... if it works it works, its just something to keep in mind)
now the song that inspired harvest's first draft is "shut me up - mindless self indulgence" while i was also having brainworms about silver deadlock while in the basement laundry room of my dorm and dancing around 😭
media really helps with getting the first spark of wanting to create something based off it, but to get a better idea of what you want, i normally come up with a short tag line that really embodies the character's aura immediately
i really wanted to capture that vibe of an alternative, punk rocker werewolf type who wants to help people. you can then build on top of that to add complexity, something that usually contradicts their desire, i.e. harvest's too much of a hot mess of themselves to help anyone in any meaningful way, which lends itself to a lot of interesting relationship drama inherently
harvest Is a unique case since a lot of her design was just . made up on the spot in the first draft, with the exception of the eye makeup and the sunglasses, those i used references bc i wanted to base their makeup off of real punk rock make up and i wanted to use a unique glasses shape.
i already have some good experience with shape language and silhouette (which i know is not helpful...) but, generally you want to have big shapes and little ones to support that big one.
to elaborate, you can see harvest's ears are obvious triangles, but there are also smaller triangles on top to build upon the initial big triangle and distinguish themselves, making them a unique shape
however, despite making so much progress on their personality and theming, i haven't actually named harvest at the point of my first draft, they were still unnamed. howeverrr... this goes into my next point :) sources, names, and backstory!
sources obviously tie into the later two, and that honestly really relies on your own knowledge and research into literature and world mythologies. wikipedia is your friend and a free resource, always use it!!!
for harvest, i just knew i wanted to change up my source list and choose someone from chinese mythology because . erm i'm taiwanese and i want to give my own culture some more representation
i already had a semi under represented character but i didn't remember her name so i first searched up fei ren zai which is honestly a treasure trove of a starter for chinese myth specifically, its a chinese cartoon where chinese mythological creatures work in an office with the bodhisattva, guanyin (highly recommend, its extremely funny and well read/written)
the character i was looking for was jingwa (goddess turned into a bird that fills bodies of oceans with rocks), however it wasn't really. all that interesting for a werewolf character and there's not a lot to work with, however it did lead me to thinking about chinese goddesses
and i came to the character of chang'e (the lady of on the moon), which honestly is one of the most represented myths in western/mainstream media but like it really fits for a werewolf character (ooo moon connection and her myth has quite a bit of iterations of whether or not she is fucking evil)
so that gave me a lot of cool ideas !! since her myth is quite well known and talked about and therefore there's a lot of complexity to explore, and i did want to redo doing a hou yi and chang'e adaptation since the first one i did was... not very well done.
but i thought it was a lot more interesting if chang'e was running away from her ex, and is therefore going by an alias (i also just love having characters that have a "true" name most of the time)
though to add a little bit more of a grey morality factor into it (as well as playing into both iterations), i also added the fact that chang'e is stealing hou yi's credit card because that's also funny as shit
"how do you come up with names" erm . well its usually just google searches and wikipedia crawls, i take a particular aspect and try to think of names that would go Well with them (a lot of the time its taking that aspect and then searching up "scientific name" and splicing that up into a usable name)
in harvest's case, i already wanted to name them after special moon phases (i.e. blood moon, harvest moon, blue moon) but erm . i really didn't get any better than harvest
now with the full body reference, i usually compile a bunch of outfits that i really like the vibe of and refine the design (below is harvest's references for their outfit), a lot of the inspiration is scraped and unused, but it's still a really good jumping off point for where you want to go from there
for me, the lacey top was non negotiable, since it gives them an "unexpected" air of innocence and feminity amongst a bunch of black and edge, so a lot of the more edgy inspirations were left unused
their longer hair was a little too much with the bigger collar and tail, fighting for attention, so ultimately it was better to chop it off and it had a more cleaner look to it.
i changed their eye make up because i thought the original was too basic, yet the shape was too complex, so i wanted to simplify it and make it more interesting to look at it with the new iteration
their sunglasses changed significantly to make it easier to draw, and the change to silver was because a lot of their accents were now silver rather than gold, and it was create unnecessary and attention to it when it isn't the focal point
the little carabiner was there because i thought it'd be soso cute to have harvest show off their #sapphic status, and the keychains are references to their literary reference :J (bunny is for the jade rabbit and the mooncake... well that's self explanatory isn't it...)
now, i wasn't planning to have hou yi be a hunter character... until my friends announced the plans of a hunter campaign 😭 and all self control was thrown out of the window
here are his final, second*, first drafts! what a glow up, man! (*even then, there were multiple iterations that i completely scrapped because i wasn't pleased with the face, let alone the outfit. i think there might've been a total of 7 drafts i just didn't save because i just kept on starting over.)
now his design process was definitely backwards from what i normally do, i had the source first, and now i had to figure out a design for them (though this is the same process i've done with the achaeans (minus ulysses) and the trojans) but this is what i do with characters that are made after the first one, but are still lore relevant.
the reason for his very clear little red riding hood influence is mainly because i thought it would be fun to do another iteration on the little red riding hood archetype, someone wronged by wolves and is now a monster hunter
i was mainly thinking of cerise hood from ever after high and her parents and how it was interesting the big bad wolf and little red riding hood were married, and i wanted to do a play on that with harvest and hou yi, though with the twist that harvest divorced hou yi, and then stole his credit cards.
i also thought that his myth of shooting down 9 suns could translate interestingly to monster hunting, having killed multiple 'monsters' (vampire, mage, demon, wraith, changeling, and a mummy) but left alive a werewolf (chang'e), who ultimately ran away from him because she was scared of him, and he's now hunting down to get closure
his image was pretty clear to me from the start, a man with dyed blond hair in a oversized red hood ! though, you can tell there are major differences in each iteration
first draft: his jacket was more like tech wear, and his hair was very much like an anime girl's (because a lot of influence was taken from rossi arknights endfield, and to an extent, i still tried to keep that influence even in the final draft)
first and a half draft: he was going to have fur on his jacket, however i couldn't incorporate it with the vash the stampede influence, it conflicted with his more industrial theming, and it feels like a impractical fashion statement that a hunter wouldn't make
2nd* draft: i was relying too much on the vash inspiration and it resulted in a stilted and stiff draft, i also changed his hair texture, but it only resulted in worsening the stiffness and i just really hate this draft, it wasn't good. i was getting too into my head about this design, trying to capture the energy of vash's outfit rather than doing my more thing. i was so upset that i didn't bother doing the detailed colors and just colored it in, which is just a vash thing lol
final draft: you can still see the influence from vash, but, i took more of a trench coat approach with this pass. obviously it helps that i used more colors to separate things from one another, but i do love this pass a lot. i really love abusing gradients, especially when i can use it to circumvent my own rule of "no same colors touching one another," it can add a lot of contrast and depth to the design when normally it wouldn't be there. the wanted to do more of my own thing rather than just relying on the awesome design of vash the stampede, especially when they're such different characters personality wise. you can see in the sketch version of this draft, his hair was still spikey like in the 2nd* draft, but other than that, it still gives off the vibe of a mercenary
now for some design notes...
his color palette being reds makes him immediately to be eye catching and an obvious foil to harvest's cool palette.
gold is his main color accent to compliment/contrast harvest's silver! also generally his color palette being warm, it naturally looks better working as compliments.
his hair is blonde but with black obviously seeping through to kind of mimic a solar eclipse, though its just a small detail
his clothes are so thick and industrial to prevent people from being able to harm him easily
he has sunglasses because he has light sensitivity, tying back into how he shot down 9 suns
his eyes are glowing red even under his sunglasses bc that's aura and awesome
anyhow! thank you for reading all this :D i really appreciate you reading all of my yap !
dededos
areudirty
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
jacobvanloon
