necropoliscomic:

When we ended the last post, I was still trying to design a character named Clara for a story called Wooden Teeth, and kept coming up with designs that were wrong, but kind of fun. I had the idea to do just a one-page short with the character walking through a graveyard, just kind of a mood piece. I grabbed a half-finished design from an old thumbnail sketch (number three of the sketches below)…

…and fleshed out the details on the page as I drew the comic. Which is, honestly, how I design most of my characters. I rarely do turns or formal design sheets unless I have to hand the character off for someone else to draw. So, the Third Sword was pretty much born here:

If you want to test a design for animation or comics, the best test is to just animate it or put it in a comic. I started thinking about the story of this girl traveling through graveyards. Why she was there, what sort of dangers she would face, etc. I worked out a rough story while I drew a few more test comics (I’ll post those next week). The tests worked out whether she could fight convincingly with that coat on (from a purely visual perspective) and as I went I adjusted the design bits at a time. Filled in gaps of things I hadn’t had to draw in previous comics.

After a few months of posting this stuff, I got an ask about posting the character designs for a cosplayer. It seemed like a good opportunity to draw turns, so I did:

And now I’m more or less married to the design. A lot of those notes are more or less wrong, more me trying to figure out my materials than me informing the cosplayer. 

But most of my design process is NOT that formal. This, for example, is all I drew to design the Young Third Sword, who we meet at the beginning of the comic:

That’s it.

Now, I did a lot of RESEARCH for that sketch, looking at different kinds of donkeys and dresses and lanterns (I dropped the lantern, eventually), looking at representations of the period I was going for and then stuff actually FROM the period I was going for. And I did a lot of thinking about it. But I only did the one sad sketch as a design. And then nailed down the particulars on the page.

I work this way partly because that keeps it fresh for me and then partly because I don’t have a lot of free time, and I can’t be spending all day doing turns and sewing patterns for every character in the comic. I prefer to be spending my time on actual pages. So my designs are generally pretty loose.

I actually LIKE doing turns, though, and love doing the math and pose-outs on characters I design at work. I just don’t always have that luxury. And I like to be productive. At some point even planning turns into procrastination.

I’ll post some more next week on how this design evolved over the other two test comics (along with those comics) and then, hopefully, we’ll get back to the story.

‘Till next time.

-Jake