Just Squidding Around

I don’t think I’ve answered anything like this before so you’ve got no reason to apologise! Tbh I can’t entirely think of a clear cut answer to give to this sort of question because I think there’s many ways you can go about gaining a following and getting people to care about your OCs, but I guess the simplest (and probably the corniest) is giving it time and maybe a steady content stream?

I don’t really know how I got much of a following, especially because I feel like more people know me on YouTube than actually on other socials, but I kind of just put my heart into making videos and trying to make sure the passion and love I have for the characters or work I was talking about came through! People like hearing you talk about your characters and their stories and when you’re clearly passionate and open to sharing that with others and the world you eventually start to gain fans who love and want to hear more about it!

A big thing I would say is have a spot where characters and lore can be compiled and easily accessed, like a strawpage or blog, that way anyone interested in your story and characters can easily read up more on your world or even certain key locations like characters rooms or favourite spots to go to, something to show how fleshed out they are and give people ideas of who they are and how they could make fan art of!

As I also said I think a steady content stream helps too! I am like a complete hypocrite with this so take that with a grain of salt 😭 but idk whenever I look towards other creators like EmmaArtly, or Inkiio, I see them talk about, draw, and post their characters on the regular whcih makes me notice and think about them a whole lot more! The more people see them the more they’ll become attached and start following along! That and have good dynamics helps hook people too! Whether characters are in a Will they won’t they situationship? Is there a big dastardly villain hunting them? Is the world ever expanding around them? Just giving questions or scenarios to think about grabs people more and get a whole lot more invested!

Tbh I did have a plan for charmix in my redesign series and actually slightly redesign those forms too, although to a much more simpler degree. I was going to start the exchantix video basically speed running charmix so we can get to the next form I want to redesign, and the plan would be just drawing over the new winx forms and adding in some extra elements like their broach, bags, and a new extra clothing piece!

So in Musa's case she gets the melody broach and the bag, but I also planned on giving her possibly a hood and maybe slightly longer rougher hair, to feel a little more rave inspired to keep the theme inline with a dance theme. I think once adding those I'll like the design more as to me it feels "under"designed right now, but for now it's just a 6/10 to me when I want it to be a 9/10

Aww ty! I love adding more elements of diversity into my work and characters, especially ones I based of my friends and family! Being queer myself I of course tend to add more elements of that in since I'm just pulling from my queer experience, but I also like to adding some other real life elements into my work too that I feel either relate to a characters story or how I interpreted them to be written, or just because I saw my friend in them so gave them a similar disability!

With a lot of characters I try to go for more subtly and implication for a show don't tell approach, or just give viewers more thoughts to chew on and see what they interpret, but sometimes I think I've jsut got to be a bit clearer and say outright what I intended more so things don't get misread or misinterpreted!