Art Corner: #6 Do you give your OCs their own fashion statements?

[Leyelle]

What is your go to way of drawing noses? Maybe because I'm a POC, most of my characters tend to have rounder noses in general, and I think I lean toward broader noses as well. I consider myself to be primarily a cartoonist, so I love being simplifying the shapes of the characters features while still rendering them in a way that represents traits that lean more toward one ethnic group or another. Unfortunately, I still struggle with characters I want to look more serious or attractive in a less cartoony world, but for my cartoons, I like the way this style shows itself.

(My female lead from "Damsel in the Red Dress")

OCs from "Sketchy Business"

My female lead from "Crysal Blue" (non cannon fit tho)

[thepenmonster]

I'd say my approach to noses was largely influenced by 80s icons like X-Men's John Byrne or Patrick Nagel

Suggest the shapes rather than render them in full. So...

[ArtGremlin]

I often tend to give my characters long, or or aquiline noses.



Only a few examples, I have a lot more. But I do have a handful of characters with tiny noses.


And then there’s my elf characters- for some reason, in the world all my elf characters are in, elves have really flat noses.


Then there’s August. An alien, not an elf, but he also gets a flat nose.

Wow, that is some serious style inconsistency going on up there

[Thumber]

[Leyelle]

is the fair-skinned woman with the red lips your OC?

[Leyelle]

I love the way you rendered Mev in that picture, it's so pretty

[thepenmonster]

is the fair-skinned woman with the red lips your OC?

The second picture?

That's by Patrick Nagel. He's probably most famous for the Duran Duran record, Rio.

I'd love to have his skills. Mine are the final three faces and I fully admit that they pale by comparison.

[Leyelle]

I like the way the lady with the blue mouse ear-thing looks. I didn't know the artist you reference, so I had no idea xd

[ArtGremlin]

Thank you! I just discovered a brush that makes me feel more comfortable making lineless art, and I’ve been going ham with it. I was kinda missing back when I used to make stuff without line art.

[allisoncandraw]

Ive been told I have a very distinct way of drawing noses lol. I'm not sure how to explain it though

[NickRowler]

I tend to give them very simple noses but I try to vary it a bit. But a lot of the time my noses are placed high up on the face.

Bertie has a button nose which I depict with a triangle.

When the nose is placed lower, it will have a longer bridge

My favorite is Zom's nose which points down

[Leyelle]

Yeah, simple noses are honestly my preference when it comes to more cartoonish styles. Looks like we have that in common, though I represent button noses with sort of upturned semicircles like the one I gave Alicia

[binahwrites]

Something i do that helps me see wich nose i like more for a character is looking at the face shape, for example when i draw Ozwald i give him a rounder nose to match the roundness of his head, and with Higen i go for a more sharper style nose to match his sharper head shape

[Leyelle]

Hair

Again, inspired by cartoons and things like that, I think I tend to draw my characters hair in very large dramatic sections. Also most of my characters have curly or wavy hair. Very few,, if any, of them have entirely straight hair. The straightest it gets is a very slight wave lol

I especially love drawing coily/kinky hairstyles and afros. Nappy girls rule!

[ArtGremlin]

I have way too many characters with Vegeta hair. Also all of them were created before I started watching DBZ I literally started watching DBZ because of this character design phenomenon of mine.
All the hair is slightly different in some way, one is made of blue fire, one is magenta, one is much shorter than the other, and one resembles Vegeta’s hair pretty closely. Idk I just like spiky hair I guess

[Leyelle]

Lol, that's an unusual coincidence, but honestly dragon ball is everywhere, so it's easy to be subtly inspired

[Leyelle]

3 Siblings/relatives

this is a quirky one. when you draw characters who are supposed to be related to each other, do you tend to make them look very similar to each other or lean into more differences?

I think it usually depends on the siblings for me, but, maybe because me and my siblings all look quite different, many of my characters look pretty different from their siblings.

I currently only have old sketches of Dominic and his little sister Cocoa, but that have a lot of traits in common

However, their other two siblings don't look a lot like them, though one of them seems more different from Dominic and Cocoa than he really is, because no one can see past their difference in skin tone

I really should get around to drawing Alicia's brother and more of my characters' parents but here are two sets of siblings from Sketchy Business

Little sister

Big sister

These two sisters don't look very alike, but honestly, with mixed-race kids, I think feature-combinations can vary greatly from sibling to sibling.

while these siblings have a lot more in common

Big bro

Little sister

---

Meanwhile here we have Therese George and her son Christopher

There's hair WAS much lighter when she was younger, but it's darkened in the last 76 years. I think he looks more like his father than his mother, but I haven't gotten around to drawing Verner George yet. His blue eyes come from Verner, but fair hair is all from his mom

[ThunderChicken]

I drew my siblings as they look. My brother Mark and my sister Heather in this one, circa 1988 or so (80's hair was a thing)

The real people:

[Leyelle]

well that doesn't count as much then lol, since your parents designed them, not you xd

[ArtGremlin]

I’d say Xivian are Daevon are pretty similar. They both have black hair, angular faces, and somewhat tan skin. (I say somewhat because sometimes it doesn’t look like they’re tan when I draw them but they’re supposed to be I promise)


Their differences: Xivian is taller by a few inches and has a longer nose and face. Also Daevon has bright purple-pink eyes, while Ian’s are blue- not normal eye blue, the blue that comes up when you google “blue”
Oh yeah- Ian has a widow’s peak hairline. Almost forgot.