talk shop tuesday (*˘︶˘*).｡.:*♡ how did you get to your current iteration of how you draw skull? what do you feel is your "spin" on his appearance?
i tend to land on final designs very quickly, but they undergo a lot of tweaking here and there until they become more solid and consistent, and that takes a lot of time.
i think with skull i always wanted to portray mainly two things - he's a menace, but a fun one at that. there's not much to go of from descriptions in books, so i went with adapting skull's psychological portrait into visual one, mainly using shape language in the process.
the easy route would've been going with triangle and sharp edges as a base and calling it a day, but that's not how i picture skull (plus there would've been too many similarities with Lockwood). square felt more like it in a sense of showing stubbornness and resilience of his character. pair it up with gaunt face, spiky hair and sharp edges, and character is a lot more showing. giving him a wider face also helps to show all kinds of grimaces that skull pulls (im 100% sure that skull was making faces even in live, ectoplasm only made it extra).
skull, however, isn't all that bad and irredeemable, there's also a tragic side to him - being a servant, neglected at that, dying at such a young age (i picture around 17-18). from here i lean more on what was said about skull like having bony legs, ill-fitted trousers and being barefooted. i also chose to draw his shirt ill-fitted but a size or two bigger, which also serves to make skull's silhouette more squarish, but light, more ghost-like instead of grounding him too much. in the final design (that lineup) there isn't much variety in colour, but it's high in contrast, something something about contradictions and such. but skull's colour is dark green, i think it's unanimous.
my spin, i guess, is making skull as far removed from victorian era aristocracy as possible - giving him ill-fitted clothes, unkept hair, making him tan and freckled with gaunt face even in life. he's still a teen but his life conditions had taken a toll on him.
also have sketches from late 2021 and last week
