pillbug heaven

do you have any advice on character design?

i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.

Yes!!! There’s an entire book called Fellini’s Faces that’s nothing but portraits of his actors that’s phenomenal for this kind of thing, though it’s fairly rare to get a hold of today.

include fat people of various sizes. this means not just people who are on the smaller side of fat, but all kinds of fat people. and don’t make them the butt of the joke or only bad guys or basically any of the negative stereotypes that exist for fat people. if you’re not used to writing fat characters, especially stay away from commenting at all on how much they eat, no matter if they eat a lot or a little. just write fat characters that are normal people.

me remembering i have a name and body and people know me: