Lilly Lux

It started when I picked Dragon/Olivia's story back up. To give some context about this character, she's a character I made along with 11 others that matched with the Chinese zodiacs (as we all have at some point I'm sure). I initially gifted her and the rest of the characters to my friend, so she had some character to write for. I've since asked if I could work on her story again and we work together with the setting for story congruency.

This kinda takes me to my current studies which is that I want to make interesting characters with appeal. I came into Dragon's redesign with some new tips from youtube about art appeal, specifically: Appeal - The MAGIC Tool to Improve Your Characters After watching that, I'd come faced with a long problem I've had in my art which is proportions, the bane of all artist. I remembered a rule that I've always chosen not to listen to for god knows what reason, the rule of heads (9 heads is like the proportion of a persons body blah blah yall know this one). I'm more of a "just get good" kinda person and prefer not to measure things as I get lost in them later in the piece.

I tested it out here as like a side by side to see how I normally draw, from imagination, just raw dogging it, and then did another drawing trying to incorporate the measurements and I realized how much I sucked at drawing then.

I looped back around to a character that I've had for a long time, oldies are the goodies, Brook, who I always seemed to draw with a head slightly to big for his body. I think this was a crutch at some point, I think the design may have gave him an innocent look that I've always visualized. So I was having fun making him actually look like a 20 something year old then a teenager.

Eventually I circled back to Olivia and began working on her design with a little more confidence. When I initially made Dragon and all of the other zodiacs, I had big ideas of making their silhouettes easy to read and to show off their character.

My old crutch, as many share with me, was having different hair styles. You can see that between Jace and Brook who look very similar, but rock different hairstyles.

This was a bit ago trying to work on that problem, trying to distinguish them with their body types because the story kinda supports them looking the same. I decided to work with shape language to accomplish that.

At the same time as those drawings, I was making characters for my animatic called Unicorn Hunters (you can watch that there). Taking a break from that project, I drew those characters in an alternate universe where they're just alt kids.

This was the process that followed that rest of the drawing featuring my OC's Jace (with the insane cow lick) and Brook (with the to die for muscles). As you can see it started off... not good with my little notation there. I decided to change Brook's positioning, thinking about appeal and shape and generally just trying to make the drawing look more satisfying. Came back the next day to color and added all the rest.