I find silhouettes and shapes just as important as detail. Silhouettes can be tough for me to integrate into the background and still make it look good. always learning.
I find a lot of these have interesting shapes which can help differentiate characters. the types of clothes a character wears is just as important as their body shape and body language, since it helps the audience recognize them. it is their ‘brand’, if you will. it also makes certain poses more or less difficult to draw. 😉
what are half of these outfits? i have no idea. the story of my life: we can take it further.
It’s probably an oversimplification, but I feel like people tend to fall into two camps: learners and innovators. This is how I will define each:
To learn is to take what someone already knows and apply it yourself. To innovate is to experiment, test, and play with ideas in order to refine a concept into a practical method, which the learners then can apply.
Innovation is no better than learning, and learning is no better than innovation. They are both vital. Nor would I say the skills are mutually exclusive to each person, but I do think people tend to lean more heavily one way or the other. However, I would say that I think it is much rarer for a person to be an innovator than a learner. Both because of how I think people are naturally wired, and because of how society operates.
I have an example. Think about adding fletching to arrows (those feathers at the end). adding three fins stabilizes the arrow in three-dimensional space and makes an archer much more accurate. To my (admittedly, limited) knowledge every society that knew about fletching added them to their arrows, because they are so much better than having arrows without. and yet, there are still some isolated tribes out there even today that do not use fletching. they have had thousands of years to invent the concept, and yet, haven’t.
You would probably think that it wouldn’t take a lot of time for someone to figure out that adding such a simple device to an arrow would aid so drastically in its efficiency, but I believe that is neglecting the effect of peer pressure upon an individual. Perhaps someone did indeed have that idea, but imagine how actively they would have to fight back against any backlash, because they would have to choose between experimenting and doing ‘work’. “Playing around doesn’t make arrows, Timmy. Quit wasting time.” You can understand the logic. I can’t imagine how many countless times this has happened in history, and I am genuinely curious how many inventions could have been made but weren’t for the simple fact that the innovators listened to their peers and ‘got to work’.
That is just a small example, but I think it happens in some form constantly in every society. Just think about having a great idea to speed up the workflow at your office job just to have it shut down because it would either require change on the part of others, or time to test on your own. Both disrupt the workflow temporarily. And even though a temporary slowdown may be worth the long-term benefits, it is often hard for humans to see the forest for the trees.
I do think that society tends to become more specialized over time as populations grow. You may have very well been able to manufacture your own arrows, bow, clothes, and learn to hunt, clean, and cook your own food for a living. Good luck trying to create your own automobile from scratch. You need assemblers to create it, you need miners to gather the materials, you need engineers to design it, and that isn’t even including the vast amounts of work hours and manpower that goes into designing and creating the machinery and technology, etc. You can only create a car after hundreds of years of buildup. It is hard to come up with how to create a car. But once you know how to do it, the challenge is much less.
Work specialization in theory is of benefit to innovators overall, because it tends to let them focus more on their innovative strengths when they have to worry less about their personal balance between ‘efficiency’ and ‘progress’, but that is just a generalization. And I doubt it changes life much for the learners, because they would still learn from others in the same way as a more generalized setup, albeit with a narrower focus.
It tends to be much easier to learn, and I would say that goes for not only the individual, but society as a whole. People are lazy. They just want to know how to do something and do it with minimal hassle. Having to discover your own way of doing things takes a lot of work. It takes a ton of work to learn how to walk when you are a child. But once you learn, it’s no big deal. Likewise, it takes grueling effort to learn how to ride a bike. But again, once you learn it is trivial. Now I ask you, would it take less time and effort to travel 50 miles by walking or by riding a bike? I say clearly the bike. But in our own lives, think how many times we metaphorically learn to walk and say “that’s good enough”, unwilling to learn to ride the bike. We do that as a society too, because society is people. There is a better way that exists (even if no one has discovered it), but it is a risk. There are people who may be willing to take that risk, but that is time they could otherwise be spending working in time-tested, safe ways. Their new way may be better, but it may be not. But they need time to figure it out to see.
I wouldn’t say I had some grand point, I just hope this will get someone thinking. Just please be careful that you don’t stop someone from learning to ride a bike when everyone else is walking.
I really do like drawing and designing clothes. which is kind of odd since I don’t care at all how I dress in real life.
playing with shapes, playing with ideas, the norm. trying to make believable designs that I could see someone wearing in real life, even if they are not necessarily practical. these are intended for the renes, though I may end up stealing elements to use for other nations. the renes in particular do not like showing skin. part of that is their colder environment, but i would hazard a guess that their climate and their particulars of modesty play into each other over time. I think that tended to happen in real life.
patterns add some flavor, but they can be a little difficult and tedious to do in B&W without breaking silhouettes or muddying the body language. if I ever use designs in the comic I have to do B&W versions to make sure they work. but right now the shapes and the silhouette are more important.
i always thought it was odd that in fantasy or scifi it is a lot more common to see “ancient clothes + modern setting” than “modern clothes + ancient setting”. i get that they wouldn’t necessarily have modern materials, but design trends seem pretty arbitrary to time.
i’m sure having logos and stuff is a lot harder without screen printing, but you never know. they might have found a workaround with the tools they had. patterns definitely have existed since the earliest days of humanity. peasants flinging mud and dressed in brown is probably more true to monty python than real life, though some colors of fabric and the details of some patterns would undoubtedly make things more expensive.
shoutout to my man alec for letting me unapologetically steal the design of his duds. like I’ve said before, it’s not about coming up with some original idea out of the blue, it is putting your own spin on it in a way that is creative. doing iterations often helps to weed things out and narrow things down.
playing with some more ideas. can you guess which parts are ripoffs? 🙂
played around with him for a bit but just wasn’t feeling where it was going. so I decided I’m gonna make him a dwarf. why not. it’ll add some interest. it’s always fun to do a new spin on something.
he is specifically of the achondroplasia variety, which I believe is the most common type. meaning he has an average sized head and torso with shorter limbs. I tried to give him the forehead and posture that I notice many dwarfs have. I might play around a bit more, but he’s getting there.
Stories existed long before writing. Some of the most ancient texts we know of likely had a long existence as oral accounts way before they were first penned. Oral traditions do rely on the faultiness of memory, yes, but I think they are much more accurate than many give them credit for. Especially if your society is organized around these histories, they would take every precaution possible to prohibit the corruption of information. Many probably trained their whole life to be oral tellers. One particularly interesting technique I discovered recently is that storytellers often skipped a generation (so a grandparent would tell their tale to their grandchild, skipping their child), which I think is really smart. You would have half as many steps for something to go wrong.
Many cultures far removed from the west still have strong oral traditions. It is fascinating how many cultures who had no contact with each other have shockingly similar stories about a global flood. 🙂
Anyway, here is some insight to the design process of a major player in ch4, of which storytelling plays a large role. He likely has been a teller for most of his life, and is respected by his people as such. He is their library. They would trust him much more than some joe schmoe telling the same story.
kids exist. and in the same space as adults, no less! shocking.
i find kids a little bit more limited of a canvas to experiment with body shapes compared to adults, but it is still possible to make some fun designs. while i believe in both nurture and nature to a degree, i find people often underestimate the role of nature. the ‘child is the father of the man’ so to speak, in my experience your temperament as a child can be easily seen when you reach maturity. i hope to show those personalities in the comic. even one infant is so different from another. i don’t think that you can necessarily be anything you want to be. I do wholeheartedly believe that you can be what you were created to be 🙂
as usual, shown above are some main characters, some minor characters, some background, and some that I probably won’t use.
feel good. had a very productive week or two. finished the opening of ch4
i said earlier that i was trying to be more intentional about body shapes in ch4.
there are a few reasons for this. first off, it helps differentiate the characters better. that has always been a challenge with any non-human character, and other facets like the tattoos (and of course, page-to-page context) are designed to help assist the reader in telling characters apart. i’m not really sure why i was so reserved with body exaggeration in the past, especially when i really go ham when I doodle and make some really crazy looking figures. since i value the characters’ silhouettes so much, exaggeration of the body will also be a huge boon to being able to tell who a character is just from an outline.
on a similar note, exaggerating the bodies also helps from a storytelling perspective because the shape of the character can better integrate with their personality. would a big beefy built boy be a grizzled bruiser? he sure would look it. or you could subvert expectations and make him a big teddy bear. stuff like that.
Of course, it’s not that I never thought about these factors until now, it’s just that now I have decided to be more intentional about it. which leads to the best part: it’s a lot of fun for me to play with body shapes. 🙂 and it’s always great to enjoy your work! God designed me to care about stuff like this, so I better invest in what I’ve been given.
chapter 3 is on the home stretch. which means chapter 4 is not only in the works, but has been for a little while now 🙂 heres some concept tidbits for little ol you. because i like ye a lot
i am actively trying to play with body shapes more this chapter because 1) it’s fun and 2) it helps differentiate characters better. I’m kind of confused why i held back somewhat on the exaggerations until now since i draw wacky body shapes all the time when i doodle. who knows.
the body shapes are especially important with this chapter because it is about a family and lineages and I want to highlight the different generations and sides of the family. the wife’s side has a inverted triangle motif and the husband i was playing with a wide shoulder shape that wasn’t ‘built’. no real reason i picked either, i just thought they would be fun to draw and sort of fit their personalities. i am trying to even have the faces have a clear continuation from one generation to the next, time will tell how successful I am. I will leave it up to your imagination for now which character is what 🙂
this chapter is also going to have a lot of kids running around. more to come later on them (hopefully).
Hutchinson, KS has a yearly comic con, of which I will be attending on Jun 18-19! I have no clue if any of you are even near the area but I might as well let you know. Feel free to drop by if you are!
