*Why* did your design your character that way?

@joannekwan Oh my gahh Jo, stop you're too nice. XD It's more like I get too into it.

I think it's probably due to the fact I watch an unhealthy amount of nature and science documentaries. D-Don't do that. You turn into that kid that knows all the animals at the zoo, and can't help being annoying telling everyone about it.

I uhh.... thankfully don't do that.... umm.... anymore.

@jessiepolfliet Oh jeebus the pressure. Umm, okay I'm going to be honest here. This is my first venture seriously tryiing to make a webcomic. I've made comics in the past just for fun, never publishing much at all, mostly just for my friends to see. I've written some stories before, and a scarce few have ever been read by others because I just hand-write them and keep them. So, I'm inexperienced. I don't honestly know how long things take to produce and make, and right now I'm cranking out the buffer for the comic.

So! I do have a deadline for myself, and that's the end of this month. Will I make it? I don't ultimately know because making comics is a whole new beast than what I'm used to, but I will do my absolute best.

Wait... I did a bit of a double take because I haven't actually talked about the story at all. XD Just the world lore and character personalities I think, because I didn't want to spoil anything important.

@isaacfriedman Oh my gosh, yes. This right here. I swear, as much as I like odd color hairstyles. Having a human character have blue hair in a war torn country makes no sense. Seriously, I've had blue hair before. It washes out so quickly and you just end up with green hair after. The upkeep is horrible, and there's no way a character in a setting like that could be dying their hair that much. XD Haha oh God, I kinda want to see that.

"Hold up guys... I got to re-dye my hair again. Commander John, reload my mag, while I soak my hair with something that costs more than our food rations."

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^^

Because I was inspired by Motoko Kusanagi and Joanna Dark.

Because her age is believable for the experience and tasks she performs.

Because I wanted her to represent a Norwegian in a sci-fi setting.

Because in the military they have a dress code, and because on the moon she needed to blend in but unfortunately the space shuttle got shot down before she could change.

Well I have recently started a comic with myself as the main character - I know, I'm such an egotist. Anyway, I wanted to make it as simple as possible but with enough detail that you would be able to easily recognise me. The only difference is that my character is reaaaaaally short - like South park short - and I'm tall but anyway he's from https://tapastic.com/series/Fo-Funsies and this is what he looks like:

When I joined Tapastic I was already working on another project for quite some time : Cold Hell, this is a harsh universe where my heroin has a violent past.
She is young but serious looking (and the tone of the comic itself is serious) plus due to the weather all my characters wear mostly heavy coat and all..

(she is the one with the blue hair)
Plus, since a project for a numeric label we have some rules to respect : no graphic sex or nudity.

...I joined Tapastic to "take a break" from it (I'm still drawing it but I needed a way to change my mind) and came up with SCAVENGER that is kind of the opposite : I want it to be funny and action packed (in a shonen way even), my heroin is sexy and cheerful and I wanted no restriction hence :

(I know, there is still the NSF restriction haha)

i dress my characters like me
or maybe i dress like my characters? [thinking guy emoji]
because i'm a chump
helps for taking reference pictures tho!

i p much have this outfit and haircut and it's embarrassing