Creating original characters
I was recently asked by a young lady about how to draw my own characters. Also check out the V Ken Marion SKY SHARKS REMASTERED cover!
Good morning! It’s been a good week!
We celebrated my daughter’s 5th birthday, Lady Death colors were completely finalized and turned in, and the Kickstarter for Lady Death launched to massive success, and V Ken Marion’s inks to his SKY SHARKS cover came in. And those are just the highlights!
Last week, a young girl my family knows reached out to me and asked “How did you draw your own characters?”
My knee jerk reaction was that I asked/hired really really good artists to bring them to life for me. You guys know, I draw a little bit, but no where near well enough to create my own characters from scratch. I’m still trying to get a handle on drawing my take on the Sky Sharks cast.
But I knew what she meant and so gave it some serious thought on how to reply in a simple and direct manner that she could understand. I can chat character and story stuff all day with a captive audience (ha! that’s you reading this now!) but it was a good exercise for me to try and make the reply as direct and clear as possible.
Here’s what I texted back to her:
Designing a new character typically comes from creating a story or, at the very least, ideas for a story.
The story and its setting will help determine some aspects of a character.
For example, a story about a soldier fighting in World War 2 will narrow down what the character will look like. A knight in armor is not likely to be the lead character in a story about World War 2 (but it can be, and then that's likely a big aspect of the story).
That's just 1 example but it applies to everything. The environment and world the character exists in will help determine what the character looks like.
Also a character's personality and specific traits can help design a new character. How would one convey that a character is an intelligent engineer or mechanic? Perhaps that character wears glasses (which is often used in stories to help identify intelligence). Maybe they have a tool belt they wear with tools to convey the idea of being a mechanic or engineer.
Those are just examples. But mostly creating new characters is about creating a story for the characters.
Or you can draw whatever you want and see if you can build a story around that.
There are no real rules to follow. Try to make something you like and build from there.
Even with as simple as I could distill the idea, that’s still quite a bit of text. I hoped that it was clear enough for her to understand, and I believe I was pretty successful in my reply. There’s more I could go into and more examples to give, but it does what I intended I think.
What do you think?
Given my example in my reply to her in the last two days I’ve seen this meme posted a couple of times. I don’t know if it’s real or not, I’m curious enough that I may look into it, but I find the serendipity of seeing this meme and my earlier example as funny.
I hope this is real, because AWESOME!
Interestingly enough, I slightly worked up a story idea about a knight and princess in WWII after that example and then the post about Josef Mencik attacking tanks in armor on horseback enhances the bits of the idea I had.
Who knows if anything will ever come of it. I have enough trouble getting the stuff I’m currently working on out. Can’t get too far into pursuing more new ideas but the pictures in my head are pretty astounding. We shall see.
A brief aside, over the last year or more I have also been working on coloring a couple issues for a new title called COLD SKY. Currently, there is a campaign live on Kickstarter to help raise funds to make issue 3, and in that campaign you can grab copies of issues 1 and 2 that I colored.
It’s a Firefly-esque type story with a very ambitious universe spanning conflict. You can check it out here
And if you want to see what I’ve spent most of my waking moments on for the last few months, the Lady Death Kickstarter is now live and is launching a massive line wide event celebrating the character’s 30th anniversary.
This week after turning in LD 19, I’ve mostly concentrated on catching up on outstanding covers that I need to turn in. Though, I have managed to make some more progress on SKY SHARKS REMASTERED and I’m happy about that.
In my last Cosmic Blast, I shared with you the cover concepts that V Ken Marion turned in for his SKY SHARKS cover and how I struggled to pick a design since they were all so good. And then I teased you about which cover we picked.
Well, here is a shot of his final cover inks and I am super excited by it and I think you will be too.
That cover is FIRE!
I’m proud of the cover I penciled and inked. Probably my best full piece in ages and ages. But you see this cover above, right?
This is why you work with skilled creators because I freely acknowledge that I can’t do this and I am so happy to work with amazing creators like Ken
Awesome!
I have nothing that can follow that amazing cover art.
So, I’ll leave it at this and wish you a very happy and great weekend.