head filled with jekyll and hyde

I’m going to be completely honest when I was first conceptualizing his design I was kind of just bullshitting my way through whatever popped up first in my head after reading the book. The only solid ideas that ended up sticking is giving him medium-length hair, (side note: I think every time I draw him I subconsciously make his hair longer) and he looked like the hatbox ghost.

A little bit after that I did kind of start to consider his design through a more “okay, but what does this say about his character?”, and I ended up going with the general idea that Jekyll still kind of likes to maintain the appearance of looking fancy at first, but cares less and less the more Jekyll indulges in the potion, and his tailcoat becomes more like a cape with the bottom of it being frayed, and his hair is unkempt.

Generally, I wanted to keep the narrative of people feeling uneasy around him, and I tried to reflect that more in him usually having a mischievous expression, and like I said before, the gentleman-esque appearance literally and figuratively decaying. As for why I gave him yellow eye-whites and red eyes? I don’t really have a reason for that other than I saw it a lot in designs for cartoon villains and I thought it looked interesting. I also gave him canine teeth that work more like fangs because of how unnaturally sharp they are. I did also end up making him pretty pale, to enunciate the “unnatural” feeling (he was almost ghostly white before I ended up scrapping the idea because it made him look more like a vampire). As well as giving him really sharp nails, almost claw-like, because again, uneasy feeling.

(also I was very determined to give him a jabot for some reason, not really sure why other than I think it looks really interesting)

Something that I’ve only told a few people is that a lot of his design and mannerisms are based on me, to an extent. I was mainly hesitant to say this because I didn’t want it to seem like I made the main antagonist like a self-insert, and it already felt really embarrassing that I related to him as a character in certain aspects (although later on I would discover that I have a headmate of a version of hyde, which I’m more embarrassed about having to explain).

Besides the obvious of doing the thing I usually do with majority of my character designs in which I self project my insomnia and eyebags onto a character, it was also kind of based on what I felt fit him. For starters, he’s canonically short, and so is yours truly (me!), at first I was kind of hesitant about making him TOO short and making him 4”11, which is roughly the height I am (although I’m more of bordering heavily on the edge of being 5 feet), but I feel like it’s within reason, since he is constantly described as being very short.

For some of the things I decided to do because it was things I experienced when I was just struggling a lot, which I felt would be fitting for Hyde, since Jekyll becomes a lot more careless and mentally drained as he indulges as Hyde. In terms of the teeth, them being on the yellow-er side was based on my experience of struggling with dental hygiene, usually in depressive episodes or just executive dysfunction. The canine teeth being extra sharp was also taken from me, as I do actually have really sharp canine teeth for some reason, and I think it already fits with the whole seeming evil thing, as most villain characters do have sharp teeth too. I was going to have all his teeth be sharp originally, but I decided against it. As for the messy hair, like I said before, it was reflecting him caring less about how he appeared, and I also had longer and messier hair when I was younger. In terms of mannerisms, I based a lot of it on Jekyll’s struggles with impulse control, and my own struggles with impulsiveness (obviously not the same degree of Hyde’s major impulsive decisions).

A large part of why I related heavily to Jekyll/Hyde is because I felt like a lot of Jekyll’s repression and need to completely separate myself what qualities of himself he deemed inherently bad or evil, felt very similar to my experience in masking. I am aware that it’s not in the same sense of what Hyde ended up being, but we are also only told a few times about what Hyde does and aren’t really told about what Jekyll considers to be “evil”. I’ll keep it brief, but a lot of my experience with masking was especially perpetuated by one of my aunts who is kind of parasocial about England (hard to explain but she’s very obsessed with it and its expectations), and ended up drilling into the values of being “proper” and “polite” and often chastising me if I didn’t conform to her strict set of standards. Anyway yeah.