Both of the authors said they cared (hi!!) so huzzah! a crude explanation of @jackotoads and my process of making our goslings designs! :)
Okay i'm gonna be very real here: the first thing we did was look up name origins and then make mock-ups in picrew! For me at least, knowing the origins of a name can help a lot with what a character should look like (say, if Palmer's family was Nordic rather than Mexican, he'd look super different than how we draw him currently).
And then using the picrew helped with getting the initials down for brainstorming (especially when two people are working on collaborating with characters).
Just for funnies, here are our original picrews for the boys, in order of Mosson, Palmer, Elliott (mine are the top row, Bow's are the bottom):
(Something we tried to implement and then immediately discarded during this process was actual Military Regulation, so initially we had them all up to code and then went "this is stupid. I'm giving Elliott a healed ear piercing")
Another thing that played into our designs were their paranormal experiences! Bigfoot isn't really anything (as far as we know), which is unfortunate, but I decided early on that Mosson's hair grows sickeningly fast, and Bow decided on Palmer's ghostly blue eyes.
After figuring out the general idea of what we wanted, we refined what we really wanted on our own (my first Mosson drawings were done traditionally in an old sketchbook of mine)
Mosson and Palmer we got fairly easily (we used Bow's Palmer and my Mosson designs), the hardest was Elliott. We tried a few more iterations in Picrew but decided it would probably be better to hop on a shared Magma canvas and just work it out ourselves. Granted we always seem to struggle drawing on Magma, but whatever lol.
Bow drew one iteration of Elliott with shaggier hair and a few moles and that's all she wrote (it's actually all i screenshotted, the two other iterations are lost to time. One of them had him buzzed i think). (And me, personally, I like to draw Elliott a little bulkier than the other goslings, but that's just personal preference lol)
And that's basically it! Of course there were other headcanons that no longer work with what we now know (I used to headcanon Mosson as Bostonian and Elliott from a farmer family in Maine. East coast runs in my veins, what can i say)
We went through the same process with Jones as well, but that one was way less documented lol.
(back when we had no idea what Jones's whole situation was, we tossed the idea of mothman and "frankenstein's monster" around. Obviously we were um. wrong. But fun to speculate regardless!)
The only thing I remember doing with Jones is accidentally making them look like twins (oopies) and their only distinguishing trait was a little mole under one eye (Connor had it under his right eye and Danny's was under his left)
One final thing cuz idk how to end this: Thank you all so much for liking our designs! I would have never expected Bow and I to make designs so cherished (and also borderline-canonical?? I think???) within this fandom.
I mentioned making a presentation about the fic to a friend a while back in some tags, and during that process was when one of the authors of Say Nothing (@thunderwhenhepurrs) said that our designs were "now a solid part of the Say Nothing Universe", so I think it would be fun to end this off on doodles of my reaction of getting that notification <3
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