Character design decisions that you regret?

ThunderChicken 2023-05-25 22:52:21 UTC #1

Has anyone else made character design decisions that they regret?

My first series is based on a true story, so the character design was easy. Everybody was drawn as they really were in real life.

My second story, not so much. It is my first attempt at fiction, and I've made some decisions that have come back to bite me.

First and foremost, my characters are shapeshifters that can take the form of birds. That's fine and well, except that I really, really suck at drawing wings. I'm getting better, but it's still a PITA. In addition to this, my main character has white hair as a human and white feathers in bird form. It's hard to draw white feathers and add shading/detail without making it look like he's got grey feathers.
An example of an early-in-the-story wing style (his hair is blue in this drawing for reasons):

...And a later style:

And finally, as a fully formed bird:

I should have made these characters shift into something easier to draw...

Legendofgenii 2023-05-25 23:01:43 UTC #2

Oh my goodness, you don’t suck at all. These look great to me.

For the shading on your white wings - I’d take a look at what the old masters did in their paintings of angels. They use like a grey-mustard colour, which works really well.

IndigoShirtProd 2023-05-25 23:26:53 UTC #3

I love this character, I do. But these damn tattoos were the worst decision I made regarding his character design. It's so tedious and it makes it practically impossible to draw him traditionally. But it's relevant to the story he's in and I couldn't think of a better alternative So in short, I played myself.

abigaillmartin 2023-05-25 23:43:14 UTC #4

The one character I sorta regret designing is Mister Fine. Because of his stupid mustache! But later it turns out better cause now he has a full on beard. Which apparently is so much easier than drawing a mustache for no reason!

I don’t even know how drawing a beard is easy for me.
I HATE DRAWING MUSTACHES! WHY DID I GIVE THIS DUDE A MUSTACHE!!?

I regret it.

But at least with a beard he looks way better. You can always improve character design.

Always.

NickRowler 2023-05-26 00:28:44 UTC #5

Miss Oh's hair (from Crow's Worth)

The major issues was that when she turns to the side, her head turned unto this teardrop and it just looks off.

And the thing is, I had an early concept art with her ear sticking out...why didn't I do that??? UGH.

AmazementComics 2023-05-26 00:48:34 UTC #6

Sometimes I think I should have created the Action Fruits with a humanoid body instead of the shape of the fruit being the actual body.

bronte448 2023-05-26 01:13:31 UTC #7

AmysGames 2023-05-26 05:11:19 UTC #8

Currently, Rikou's freaking rainbow beads. Remembering to draw them + making them consistent is proving very annoying, lol.

TheSingularitySeed 2023-05-26 07:14:59 UTC #9

I also think those wings look good!

For me, I regret glasses.
I like glasses a lot! I think they're beautiful and charming so I have a lot of OCs with glasses.
Then I drew them 100 times and now I have regrets.

It always feels like this extra thing after I've finished the face. Like I did all this work and now I have more work! No!

I've only introduced 3 so far but I might need to start getting these nerds contacts or something

LostKelp 2023-05-26 11:09:55 UTC #10

My problems feel a lil structural, in my series there are 4 main jobs the main characters can have: technitian, medic, pilot and military experiment. Each job gets a corresponding uniform.

this is fine most of the time as we focus on the crew who all have different jobs. But when there's scenes with people of the same job it can be difficult to track.

But like I mean the whole story is about how they live under a corporate hellish empire who dehumanizing their employees to the point of being human cogs that are totally interchangeable. And the Shadows have this problem magnified, because they have the same body type and completion. But that's also for story reasons because the main villain is a bigot who thinks violence is power and therefore only certain kinds of people should be able to do violence. Namely, light skinned, able bodied, masculine presenting people. So all the choices I've made, make sense contextually but make it a pain in the ass to tell the story. Next time I think I'll just tell a story about some lesbians who are the reincarnated elementals of Halleys comet or the embodiment of death and the ghost hunting polecule he befriended.

bronte448 2023-05-26 15:04:24 UTC #11

In my artstyle, I can get away with filling the glasses with the eyes and chalk it up to magnification, but sadly yours might be a little too realistic to do that...
BTW the person in the middle looks like Mirabel from Encanto and I love it (though it may be the green light.)

ThunderChicken 2023-05-26 21:16:55 UTC #12

Thanks for the compliments on my wings, everyone! I appreciate them, though those wings will always suck in my view (and they take soooooo long to draw!). I'd much rather draw fur than feathers. My characters can shift into birds and mammals, and I much prefer drawing the mammals. So of course a large chunk of my story involves flying.

Just look at how much better my fur drawings come out. First we have Owen, who can change into a golden eagle and a Kodiak bear. My main character, Daecon, is riding his back in that first pic I posted above, but here he is by himself:

His son Evander in Cheetah form (note that my characters' colours do not perfectly match their wild animal counterparts - their fur colour is usually the same as their hair colour in human form):

And Owen's husband, Leander. This one is my crown achievement for fur detail, though this platform will undoubtedly remove much of that detail:

A closeup of his fur to show the detail (hopefully this will not reduce)

ThunderChicken 2023-05-26 21:19:42 UTC #13

I love the tattoos, but I can see how that would be a pain to draw because you'd have to make them the same every time. My hat is off to you!

I always have a hard time drawing a mustache without making the character look like a 1970's porn star. It's hard to make one look "normal" for me.

Some of my characters have heterochromia (different coloured eyes), It always makes me feel weird to draw them in profile where you can only see one eye. And, I don't know if it's a factor of me being right-handed, but it's always the right side that I tend to draw

I happen to be an action fruit... except maybe not so much the action part...

I am very much like that with the title for my first story. Being an LGBTQ story I wanted to include the colours of the rainbow. The problem is that the title has more letters than the rainbow has colours (I use the traditional ROYGBV rainbow) so I try to fade the colours to spread them out. Instead of Red-Orange-Yellow-etc I do Red-Reddish Orange-Orange-Orangeish yellow-yellow-etc. And it comes out different every time I do the bloody title. I finally cottoned on to this and saved it as a scalable vector so that I can resize, tilt, etc as necessary but before I did there was zero consistency. Just compare these two images, paying particular attention to the last few letters in the word "Nights". The letters

H, T and S in each image are completely different colours.

Don't give them contacts! I love glasses on people. Always have. It is not a coincidence that the character that I consider to be the most attractive in my story wears glasses (this is the character that shifts into that cheetah I showed in another
post):

That similarity works in a story like yours, though: If you look at any army the soldiers all look the same. Heck, look at the Stormtroopers in Star Wars! Or look at the different ranks in Star Trek (which has me worried for the dude with the red on his uniform)

TheLemmaLlama 2023-05-26 23:03:27 UTC #14

I'm starting to slightly regret giving Alana a slightly transparent shirt :'D

(But only slightly, because I'm halfway done drawing her introductory scene and I remembered that people can change clothes XD)

Well in my art style I just draw the frames with one stroke and no rendering XD

(but yeah, I guess yours might be a little too realistic to do that as well )

TheSingularitySeed 2023-05-27 00:52:45 UTC #15

@bronte448
Ooo I can definitely see the similarities now that you mention it!

@TheLemmaLlama
Translucent clothes are such a pain! That would be my second regret.
And one of my glasses OCs also has translucent clothes

I used to draw the frames like that before doing digital. I think if I didn't start out that way I wouldn't have so many nerdy OCs haha

@ThunderChicken
Characters with glasses usually end up being my favs too!
I will endure for other glasses lovers

moontokkym 2023-05-27 07:08:13 UTC #16

Having so many characters with asymetrical designs.

Every time I think I've remembered which hand my main character's ring is on, there's at least one panel every 3rd page I have to go and correct. Then there's the characters with the shoulder pad, the character with the shaved side of her head, the character with the holes in one side of his tattered shirt, the character with the flower in her hair, the character with the mech arm, the character with the fish tattoo on her hip and it goes on and on!

Like even Khay who's design is relatively simple compared to others has asymetrical designs all the way through.

ButterflyEmpress 2023-05-30 04:25:13 UTC #17

I think the way you draw wings is good. I've only drawn one feathered OC and it can get pretty tedious. The only solution I can think of is pre-rendering some wings and pasting them where needed.

My regret was designing the human characters with unnatural hair and eye colors. It made it difficult to design clothes since they would clash. Also the brightness was hard on the eyes

cherrystark 2023-05-30 04:42:40 UTC #18

Do character names count? I named a character Mira as a loose reference to Aquawoman (not Amber Heard), but shortly after her first appearance was published - I realized that Mira's a mermaid. If that's not confusing enough, I also have a character named Mina.

VersusVII 2023-05-30 05:45:28 UTC #19

Your wings are cool!
Some character design I regret are:
Marika's hair in front of her face. They hide part of her eyes, it was aleays a pain to place those strands.
I then decided she will clip them up after few chapters.

Another character I regret for his design is Timothy: the pageboy haircut plus the glasses is a letal combo. I made a reference sheet only to draw the hair in every angles.