Exercise: Character development. Part two: Designing the characters.

I started listing my references and attempting to categorise the different characters into groups.

I brainstormed an original character, deciding roughly on coming up with some kind of adventuring hero.

I had an idea for a kind of wandering mechanic character in one of these fantasy/post-apocalypse worlds.

It was fun to repeat the drawings, as the more I drew her the more personality she ended up with. Initially I thought of a kind of stoic wanderer, but I came around to a more sassy, fun character. Happy with the outline, I made a character sheet.

For my second character I wanted to really go in a totally different direction. I came up with what I thought was a pretty fun idea. I wanted to make a humanoid cow who was also a necromancer, who wanted to take revenge on humans for farming and slaughtering her fellow cows. She reanimates the skeletons of dead cows to make an army to enact her retribution.

It was a lot of fun to brainstorm this character. It was interesting to try and develop the head and how it would move and pull off expressions. For the body I looked at pictures of gorillas to come up with this kind of knuckle-walker thing, which I thought would work well for the character.

I’m really pleased with this one. It’s such a fun idea, and I think it turned out well.

I think this was one of my favourite exercises to research and draw, and I think the end results are pretty good.