*Why* did your design your character that way?

Uuu it's great to find out what people have in mind while desgigning their characters hnnnn

Compare to a lot of people, I don't think I spent even that much time designing my characters for :Rebirth... In fact I already had some character concept for the story laying around in my folder collecting dust from a long time ago.

Noah was purposely designed to be young-looking despite his actual age that is close to 30. I wanted to portray a "clumsy" and "inexperienced" father... that doesn't really fulfill well the role of a "father". "Frail" and "Weak" was something I had in mind while designing him because he has health and heart problem ever since he was born. This also explains why I went and gave him a paler skintone compare to the others. He usually looks extremely calm because he is used to keeping himself calm due to his heart problem. If he panics or feeling strong emotion, his heartbeat might get out of control. Noah's choker is probably something that people would remember him by, a very eye-catching choker with a heartbeat monitor that will serve a big purpose in foreshadowing so many thing about Noah later in the story.

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Then my other main character: Neo, Noah's son, on the other hand was designed with "independent", "resentful" and "anti-social" in mind. (Or my readers like to call him an emo kid) His look is based off Noah's appearance down to the very eyes color, he is sorta like a mini version of him, but even more quiet. Some people might ask why the airmask? Beside the fact it makes him look even more like an "outcast", he does have a reason for wearing it and it's spoiler so I can't talk about it LMFAO Neo's personality is very mature, sometimes even more mature than Noah, and despite his age, people shouldn't take him for a simple 13 years old either. His action and line of thinking is questionable for a kid, but I assure you all that is on purpose because he is... Neo.

For the gender, because I want to portrait a father-son relationship and the awkwardness between the 2 characters that doesn't really look like they fit the father-son category look and personality wise. Compare to a usually more "motherly" mother, Noah as a father that doesn't understand his son one bit would fit the bill better for me. For the race... I don't really bother myself with race when I draw my character. I'm a minority when it comes to race too but I don't really care what race a character I like is nor would I scream for diversity in a story. People can design whatever kind of character that appeal to them. It can be all Asian, all white, all black for all I care.

Noah is 29 at current time while Neo is 13, I didn't want Noah to be too old nor Neo to be too young so they are what they are LMFAO

Noah ignored Neo for the longest time because- S-S-S-S-SPOILER. 😂

I like simplicity and economy in character design as well as repeated patterns and shapes for certain characters. As for clothing choice, accessories, hair styles, size and shape, there are reasons for them all and they largely revolve around the lifestyles and preferences of the characters themselves. That's all there is to it for me.

Characters like Morris (shaved head, small and slight with buck teeth) and Serge (tall, slender, strong with long blonde hair) were improvised on the page but formed from a knowledge of what they were like as children, whether their parents loved them, what they ate, where they slept, what their favorite colours are, etc.

Likewise Jed is athletic and broad-shouldered because he is a hunter and a sailor. He's a tough old stick, been through the mill a few times, but still a child at heart. How do you put that across in character design? By giving him long hair and a beard his mother would have hated, a bunch of bandages and his dad's old coat. Boom.

Pretty self explanatory here. She's a martial arts mercenary so she has traditional chinese themed clothes (except the middle one which is casual wear). the story is a fantasy world she she has no "race", but she's meant to be half white- half chinese.

I kid you not I designed a character under the pretense of "I want to make a spiral person" and then somehow I managed to flesh it out to more than that.
As for my my two comics everything is based off dreams so they all came from dreams.

I designed and created Roxy the way I did because I knew I wanted a more Earth/Gaia based character for the story, considering it takes place primarily on an island. Since Cosmos Song is fantasy with magical elements, I also wanted to give her a slight otherworldly appearance as well. Also, her bright and colorful appearance was intended to mesh with her vibrant personality. I also knew I wanted her hair to be extremely big and curly, it's just so fun to draw all the coils in her hair xD! All of the characters in my story are human, but I consider them alternate humans.

Roxy's a tropical character, her ethnicity sort of reflects that she's an islander I guess. Her story is actually much older than what is seen in this comic and there is a lot of back story and behind why she and the leading male in the story are 19 in this comic!

She doesn't have a mother or a father but she does have a grandmother, adopted sister and several cousins in the story.

crimson mask. the woman with two mothers (but you will have to read the comic to find out why)

i wanted her to have a costume that could easily blend in with a crowd and be practical. her hair is the same color as her genetic half sister (although they were not born from the same woman) this was a bit of a clue that she was related to Jane Jones but i don't think anyone picked up on it. at first i gave her a gun but decided to get rid of the gun after a while because she has no real use for it , she has super human speed and strength and so a weapon in herself.

The Swipe city Guardian

ok i will fess up i designed his suit first because as a kid I wanted a super hero with the first initial of my name on his chest ( Aron is my second name) . his belt contains an anit-grav device to stop him falling rapidly when he jumps off buildings and the cuff have a magnetic field to repel bullets . I wanted a hero with faults so hes fast and strong but he can be hurt and he also has a built in fail safe that makes him loose his powers if his body burns too much energy and risks his health. ( the fail safe is a big weakness) also he's basically a self centered teen brat who has just been given powers so he is always in trouble. (but his big wake up call is on the cards)

I based my character designs on things I thought in my mind would make them seem cooler or make them different from others

For example my main character Zack Wandaz, I decided to make him half blind so he doesn't possess eyeballs and he also has transparent white hair so he is one of my characters I always draw his eyes through his hair
THE LAST SAMURAI1

OK, this is sort of obvious. His name is Crow and I designed his outfit to look like a black bird (crows don't have orange beaks or feet, but they do appear like that in cartoons).

Why is the character the gender or race you choose for them? Why are they the age they are?

My main character is based on me and the way I look. She has longer hair then me and a different clothing style. But her face, glasses are me exactly. Her personality has a lot of me in it as well. ^^ https://tapastic.com/episode/373496

I have always loved red hair and has it myself So yeah. ^^

There's ascually a funny story behind Captain Ufo2's look.
When I created the character, he was a bit bossy, arrogant and full of himself. A kind of Zapp Brannigan from Futurama. The original design had Ufo tall with large shoulders and prominent chin. When I started toying with the idea of turning the project into a webcomic, I decided that I would need a writer, so I asked a friend of mine. He started to jokingly call the character Gufo, which might require a bit of explanation: the acronym U.F.O. in Italian is pronounced oofo (that is, oo like c**oo**l, f like far, o like c**o**ld). Gufo means "owl". That made me think; I started doodling and I tried to give the character an owlish look: big head, small triangular body, big round eyes and big bushy eyebrows pointing up. The result is this

which, as I kept drawing it, became this (very first page of the comic)

and finally this

Fun fact: I put an easter egg that references this story in the second page of season one: in that page we see Captain Ufo "acquiring" his ship from another captain of the same alien species. that captain has Ufo's original design. Even if I didn't write that page, I thought it was funny to have the new Captain Ufo killing the old one and stealing his ship

Even funnier (to me, at least), the writer of season two, ignoring this backstory, decided to bring back the old captain as the avatar of the new ship's computer:

i wont get into anything super specific, but when i design characters i have two major goals, one being that the design should overall be fairly simple, my other goal is that no character should ever look too similar to any other character, even if they are the same race or same species or siblings.

WHY? for one, from a design standpoint having simplified designs makes the characters easier to remember, which makes for faster drawing.
for two, having unique characters makes for easier reading because you know who is who, and more fun reading because more variety is always fun to look at 8) i can't tell you how many comics i have skimmed over because i had trouble telling some of the characters apart. 8(

making the background characters more generic so your main characters seem more interesting never has to be a problem, either. you can always use color, composition, and dialogue to indicate who is in what role! it's so cool!


i think in these examples it is pretty easy to tell who the main characters are despite the background characters being in the foreground... i hope i didn't go too off topic, this is just the kind of stuff i could talk about all day !! :o)

I feel conflicted posting because my comic isn't quite ripe yet, but I also don't want this awesome thread to die.
So uhh, yap. Enjoy some "coming soon" characters I guess? XD

(left) Amber and (right) Skye of Pest Caravan (Fantasy, Sci-fi Comic)

I guess I go about designing characters by thinking of the world first, then creating the species that inhabit it. In the mythic world of Pest Caravan, traditional fantasy job classes are instead species that evolved with specific traits to suit the job class they're based on. Concept wise, it was a good enough start to try roughing out the different species and to see how close I could get to the class with only using natural laws. Magic doesn't exist in this world, but the scientific equivalent does.

So Skye's Bard species design was the easiest. If you need the ultimate singers in the animal kingdom, you can't go wrong with birds. I specifically chose a bearded vulture as a base for his character, because the animal behaves extremely similar to Skye. Bearded vultures' calls are nothing but a low raspy squeak despite being an imposing bird. They also cunningly feed off the bones of other animals by breaking them on hard stones. Skye is just as much a scavenger, living on the lowest rungs of society, and even though he is a member of the Bard species, he has an utter disdain for singing. Also, bearded vultures come with built in eyebrows that are perfect for emoting!

Amber's design was a little tougher, as she was a Pyromancer species. When nothing natural exists that can summon and wield fire, you have to think outside the box. Originally, I considered making her look very human as I was afraid of making too many creatures main characters. Ultimately, it got scrapped because it made absolutely no sense with the narrative.

So, with this creature design, I started with the base elements of what a pyromancer job class can do. I knew firstly the creature had to resist fire, and would probably be thick skinned or armored. After picking out some armor plated animals I liked, I went on to think how the fire could be made (without magically summoning it), and came up with friction plus accelerant chemical plus flammable oil (for sustainability of the flame). So if the animal were a mammal, you could produce a flammable oil sweat, have retractable quills or finger tips coated in an accelerant, and have the skin be rough enough surface to entice a good spark.

And oh jeez, doing that for all the classes was quite the challenge, but I wanted a fantasy world that didn't have your standard fair elves, dwarves, and orcs. As much as I love reading stories about them, I really had fun designing something new by treating a fantasy setting like science fiction.

@sarrowsmith10 I guess to quickly answer your other questions:

Honestly, you could flip the genders of all the characters, and it wouldn't change the story a bit. All characters are intentionally androgynous, and gender really isn't a factor in this world. Somehow sexisim never took off, but speciesism and racism? That's another thing entirely.

For Amber, she's basically a child, and I thought it would be interesting to have a large ogre-like species not be a hulking brute adult. It plays into a story quite a bit actually. For Skye, he's at the age of finally understanding how the world works and coming to terms with it.

No one of the main cast have parents that are dead actually. Unless you count the Necromancers, but that's cheating really.
Skye ended up with Amber for reasons other than death or abandonment.

Edit: Made some corrections and added sketches.