as always, playing with things to see what i like and what i don’t. in real life people wouldn’t dress like they do in the fire nation (“we all have to wear red!”), but it definitely helps the reader. you have to be a little heavy handed sometimes to drive a point home.
these are some ideas i have for the Otigo people. at this point they will not be the main focus but will impact other nations in the area through their actions and culture. they are a loose group of many disparate tribes and i was dabbling with how to make the body shapes and outfits distinct but not too different (they are all part of one people group). at this point i’m leaning towards reducing the diversity even though I like most of the outfits in a vacuum. ideally i want the reader to be able to fairly easily recognize any of these characters as from the otigo area. for that purpose they’re not there yet. how close should they be to each other? that is the question.
like the last post about flags, a lot of these are ripoffs of real-life flags. also like last time, it helps to weed out generic ideas in favor of something that hopefully will have more legs. just playing around as always.
the goal of a lot of these is to make something distinct but still have competent flag design. it can be pretty hard to make a design that is simple and distinct. it can be hard to keep it from getting too cluttered or busy. i see why many flag designs have (what i feel are) too many elements. it can be pretty tempting. but it is also for good reason that most real-world flags air on the side of minimalism, even the incredibly old ones. keep in mind that you also need to recognize a flag at any size, what if you are on the border of enemy territory and see a flag in the far distance. It is only a millimeter in size relative to you. I hope you will be able to tell if it belongs to friend or foe.
also for these flags in particular it’s important to keep in mind how these look in B&W. pretty useless to come up with some crazy colorful pattern when the comic is monochrome. it’s not really that big of a deal, because I believe that the pattern of a flag is much more important than the colors anyway. it’s like its silhouette.
i dance about as well as a large tree but i do find it pretty interesting.
body language is of course important to me and dancing obviously opens up a lot of fun opportunities. it’s also just how some people [and cultures] celebrate and praise even if I don’t. it helps me understand others even if it’s just in small ways.
tails fulfill a similar function to dancing skirts in real life. in artistic terms they assist the line of action.
Back when i was laying the groundwork for the comic I worried about having to follow a small cast of characters for years on end and was worried that I might get burnt out on them before long. one of the strengths of the quasi-anthology format I came up with for motherland is that it lets me flip around between new characters often. if I like one I can come back to them in the future, and if I feel satisfied with a character’s arc I can leave it there. it lets me dabble. i like to dabble.
most of the time when i do a story i just have a very rough outline of what happens. i more or less make it up as I go, filling in sections here and there and letting the story sort of take its own path. I’m sure that ‘winging it’ would make some creators cringe but it gives me life. i spend less time worrying about who i want the characters to be and just go along for the ride for who they are. i sort of treat them like if I was meeting a real person.
as a result, when i am working on the visual design of a character, the design may not match up with who they seem to be turning out to be personality or arc-wise. Su for instance i knew from the start was going to be one of the main players for ch4 and she originally was going to have the design shown on the upper-left. but the more i got to ‘know’ su, the more some elements felt out of place. i ended up with the headdress shown on the upper right after some iterations because it felt much truer to something that a very shy introvert might wear. i did like the first headdress design, so i ended up using it on the older sister. but it felt too ‘confident’ for su.
that is just a tiny example, but for my process it is a frequent occurrence. the design of the character influences who i imagine they might be, and vice versa. they feed into each other. i really enjoy the process. not every artist necessarily thinks that way.
a lot of times i’ll just doodle face or body shapes and mill over ‘who could this be’? a lot of character designs i’ve come up with over the years came about as a result of this process. a lot of it is barely intentional. i’ve always thought that I was stronger at ‘putting together a puzzle’ than i am at designing according to a strict concept. people ask me if i draw what i see in my head. i do to a degree, but it is more that I can turn shapes into other shapes and make an image or a statement from elements of what i see rather than have a clear concept in mind from the start. i play and listen a heck of a lot more than i plan.
i like the characters showing me who they are, so to speak. i’ve come to realize in recent months that understanding is one of my main driving forces in life, whether that’s people or concepts or anything else. i want to know and help others know and that is a huge reason why i pay attention to people and their motivations. this doodling process that i do is just one way that i use this desire and hope to share it with others. i enjoy the artistic process, but it is more of a means to an end for me. however, it one of the best facilitators for me to understand others and help others understand – regardless of if those others are real or fictional.
some more body shape doodles. just seeing what works and what doesn’t for the story.
trying to design the clothes hand in hand with body shapes, which i haven’t done as much in the past as i probably should. the clothes and silhouette are basically the characters’ “brand”, i think it helps for them to build off each other. it makes the impact more distinct at least.
panel borders always kick my butt. it’s still easier for me to draw characters without worrying about panels even after all this time. a lot of times i like how a character silhouette looks in a vacuum but when it’s on the panel it clashes with other elements. oh well. still learning
there are times when I need to think about mechanisms that may exist in the background of the comic, but are not focused on heavily.
I admit that prisons and legal systems are not a topic that I know a ton about, especially in regards to cultures or times of which I have limited understanding. for most cases like these, I tend to just gloss over them in the story. work to your strengths. and the anthology nature of the stories mean I can flit between different tales without having to commit too much to areas outside of my ‘expertise’. That said, it’s still a fun thought exercise to play with relatively unknown topics (for me) to see if I can figure out how things would work. I try to look at history to see what people actually did, and I try to use common sense. How successful will I be? I guess we’ll see!
though i doubt prisons in motherland are anywhere close to the industry that they are in many places in real life, i also doubt they are rare. probably still rarer, because in most places in the gulf they would just make prisoners into slaves or execute them instead. that way they would either be free labor or permanently out of your hair, a much more pragmatic solution. an exception would be political prisoners, who you could use for leverage or ransom (in the case of a powerful individual, a hefty sum). of course i’m sure the law isn’t going to be just executing any joe schmoe who commits a petty misdemeanor but I doubt prisoners in this world have a lot of rights. if you owe someone, they are gonna try to get their payment – likely often seizure of property or person (indentured servitude, which has been very common throughout history). if by necessity the debt necessitates prison, so be it. or so I would assume.
I’ve heard things about ancient roman prisons like they more or less only existed to hold people for trial. I’ve heard that some of the prisons were in absolute darkness and many who were kept there indefinitely went blind. is any of this true? It is hard to say, no one alive today was there. it is difficult to trust scholarly analysis at face value because humans make mistakes and often manufacture facts from theories. human nature doesn’t change however, and there are constants that I think can be gleaned from any subject.
like anything, I’ll have to learn more about it. or just see how well I can skirt around the issue in the comic 😉
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.
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.
