*Why* did your design your character that way?

I've come to realize that my character clothing design choices are kind of boring, and I'm planning to revamp a lot of them in the near future. In most of my designs, a scientist wears a labcoat, a soldier wears a uniform, a POW wears the tattered remains of whatever he was wearing when he was captured, etc. However the faces and bodies are what I try to vary most. There are the obvious body types like Brutus, Anderson Gunn, and FRAAAZ who are all meant to be physically strong, so I give them large, blocky or round frames, often with some visualization of stress or strain visible on the surface. The characters who are fast and unpredictable are slimmer, shorter, and tend to smile more. Mutated characters have visible skin defects and/or differences in the structure of other external organs that may or may not relate to their abilities. Hair and skin color are usually assigned by those that would make the most sense based on their location. There's no such thing as a place where is doesn't matter what hair or skin color a character has. Brittain in 1941 wouldn't have a lot of black soldiers and Germany in the same period wouldn't have a lot of brunette soldiers with big noses. France, on the other hand, would likely have a number of visitors from its colonies who are not white and who don't speak the best French. America would have a lot of black soldiers during this time, but no Asians on the pacific front. Hair color is also important, obviously, and I don't believe in giving characters a hair color not on the brown spectrum unless they dye it and have a reason for doing so even if that reason is just "I think it looks cool." No serious protagonist should have recently dyed hair unless it's part of a plan to deceive somebody. No serious action protagonist would have a pink streak through her hair unless it had significance to her because of her past. Basically, nothing in the character design should be without an explanation in-universe. The explaination cannot be "The author thought it was cool," but it can be "the character thought it was cool."

Everything I just said about human character design also applies to alien and monster design. If it cant be explained in-universe, it shouldn't be there.

That would make a great SNL or Flying Circus sketch XD "Hold on, hold on, just need to let it sit for a bit" "WE ARE UNTER FIRE!" "Just a mo', got to let the follicles soak, y'know." "THEY HAVE TWELVE GOD DAMN TANKS." "And I have four more bloody minutes! Let the panzers come as long as my locks are the right shade of indigo moonlight I don't give a damn." "HOW DID YOU MAKE CORPORAL???"

Sure! Why not? We can struggle not to correct people when they mispronounce animal names together. XD

At least the knowledge wasn't complete waste I guess. I've saved a lot of snakes' lives telling people the difference between a poisonous and non-venomous snake. Seriously why does everyone feel the need to kill snakes? They eat vermin! D:

Sorry, animal rant over. XD We can resume on topic now.

@otterchild Oh gosh, thank you so much! : >

@jessiepolfliet Aww, thank you too for subscribing. The idea of that blows my mind, but if you feel the story or whatever isn't for you, don't feel bad about unsubscribing later okay? D:

Hey sometimes working page by page is a great motivator! ...It takes every ounce of strength I have not to start uploading now. I don't know how artists like Anna Landin build up their buffers so high. I don't think I could do a 50 page buffer because I'd be too tempted to go back and rework pages which is awful.

....Gahhh. Okay, I'll umm, do one more. A short one because I don't want to clog the thread any more with my crap.

So I have a problem where I can't leave a design alone until I'm 100% happy with it. Amber's design got nitpicked like crazy, because I knew she'd get a lot of panels devoted to her. I knew for her clothes, I wanted a really stupidly designed outfit that is borderline hero adventurer cliche. There is a reason, and it is disclosed fairly early on. So, I'll have to make you wait on that one, but I can talk about the rest.

As far as the colors, in the last design I liked how the orange looked until I paired the design against Skye and realized, oh no, I have two bright yellow-orange characters wearing blue. So I tried to go with a cool palette to contrast Skye and the other two main characters. Since she was armor plated, I looked at beetle shells. I really liked the bright blue-green iridescence they had, but I was afraid it might blind readers so I toned it back quite a bit.

Another big change I wanted was to show she was a growing child of a significantly larger species. So I actually designed the adult Pyromancer first then shrank it down to make what the child looked like. When I shrank it down the first time, I realized something didn't make sense with the design but at the time, I wasn't sure what it was exactly.

So I image searched a lot of baby animals of larger species (a good excuse right?) to see what I was missing, and it sort of hit me in the face. When you have a puppy, what's the first thing that grows? The hands and feet. XD It makes sense, because you've got to grow to accommodate the change in weight in height, otherwise you fall over. So when you're a child belonging to a race of giants, it only makes sense that your limbs are going to look a little stupid for quite awhile.

Okay, I could talk about character design all day, but I'd rather see other people come and talk about it too. XD

Edit: @joannekwan You know you wanna show all your preliminary designssss. XD

Since Superbia's a setting with characters that range wildly in appearance and culture living alongside average American/Superbian humans, I wanted the main character to represent some of those differences, but also the things that everyone has in common regardless of where they come from. Petra Slate is a Nain Rouge. They're responsible for a lot of demon/devil mythology, which really has shaped people's opinion of them in the present day. Her left horn is much bigger than the other one - her mom prompted her to try attending a mixed-species high school, and the right one was broken by bullies on the first day.

Her pupils and often her eyes glow like fire, and often get significantly sharper when she's angry or panicked. Contrary to popular belief, fire-breathing is a defense mechanism, not a weapon, and you have to push a Rouge a long way to get them in that state. She's got a scar over one eyebrow, but that was only from tripping on a playground when she was really young. She'd give you a cooler explanation if you asked.

The nose of a Rouge tends to be somewhat flattened, and will completely seal if they're underwater or breathing in smoke. The darkened area above their eyes is a natural one, and tends to be a little sunken. They've got very long necks and sloping shoulders, which fits a little more with their ram or deer aesthetic, and differentiates them from humans.

She wears a poncho with kind of a green-blue and faded red - these colors are present in a lot of vintage neon signs, and are common in Superbian area signs as well. The colors are pretty important to the setting, so I thought it would be interesting to tie her in with it that way.

Anyways! Thanks for letting me ramble! And take a look at Superbia if it piques your interest! More readers are always appreciated.

I like how you are playing devil's advocate to character design. It's important to know why you give design your character because they have to reflect their personality, what they represent or their social class. I think I my recent OCs from my comic In the Midst represent this philosophy.

Sikaru she is kind yet shy. She also has a good taste in fashion.

Amilia is brave and very much a tomboy. Although she has a little femininity.

Elvos is charismatic and wants to appeal to the opposite gender.

Ooh neat topic, definitely something to think about!
I typically design based on personality. Serious, mature female characters go well with long hair, usually with a dark color. More energetic female characters I draw with short hair, larger eyes, etc. Either that, or I was too lazy to draw and color long hair XD
My character from Laifu is actually a persona of myself haha

Since the genre of the comic is comedy/slice of life, I use a simple sort of style... Which is an excuse, because I'm just too lazy to create a beautiful character XDD

There isn't really a reason why I design my characters the way they are. If i find it as a good design, I will work with it. and from another thread I talked about how simplicity for character design is important to me. I like to make my designs "distinguishable" if possible.

Examples:

most of my characters started off as doodles - i made several prototype comics (just trying out some possible plots, and trying to get a feel for these characters

after some time, i realized what i liked about those two, and their dynamic and the more well rounded they became, the more the design changed to something that fit their personalities

and now they look like this:

FOR INSTANCE: i stopped drawing xalem in turtlenecks, bc he isn't just a nerd, he's also immensely creative and slightly insane and doesn't really care about normal clothing choices, so i gave him a dog collar + tie combination^^ kendrion's mark used to be a slightly darker brown, but the mark is a very important part of why she is who she is (at least at that stage of her character at the beginning of the story), that's why it's now completely black - i also used to give her more feminine traits (earrings, lipstick) but i dropped that, bc she wouldn't really have time for that. she's a busy person^^