#I USED TO CLOWN ON ZOOM'S HAIRSTYLE BUT IM LIKING IT NOW

[irlnorthshaw]

the fact season 7 gave us TWO sultans episode... man is this what it feels like to be spoiled 🙏🙏🙏

they're so real for not trusting that tall white man. I KNOW THAT'S RIGHT!!!!!

moonbug i beg you... i WILL be seeing the sultans again. mark my words

[frenzyarts]

Could you talk a bit about how you design your OCs from a visual level? I really love their designs. Only if you have the time and energy of course <3

Thank you so much omg 💕 I was trying to think of a good way to answer this question, but the truth is my methods are very nebulous and hard to define! I’ll do my best though 🥳

Some characters come to me very easily, some go through a few revisions, and some go through a meat grinder of revisions lol. Rune was easy, her design was just in my head right off the bat from years of drawing/thinking about demons. Yorick was a little different. Awhile back I played a ttrpg and designed this character:

Look familiar? This is prototype Yorick!! (I have this on my portfolio at a higher res if you wanna zoom in or something idk) She was a character who was kind of elfin and was a clown who controlled shadows. When I started pinning down the stories and characters of A Slowly Beating Heart I KNEW I had to put a demonic clown in there, and I thought of this design.

A phase I go through when designing characters when im not sure how they’re gonna look is doing a bunch of iterations based on vibes. Here’s some of the earliest Yorick sketches I could find, you can see how they don’t quite look “right” yet:

Like the vibes were there but that’s not our Yorick! Here’s what I think might be the first or second sketch I did where they look right:

I used the old Yorick I had designed but finally modified the outfit and design in a way that pleased me. I went with this design, and went through some minor edits with the colors, and boom, the demon clown was born! (Though even in this image they aren’t quite right, in the final comic I got rid of the lines on their horns and saturated the green parts of their eyes):

Melody is another story. Versions of Melody had also been living in my mind for almost as long as Rune, but never as a solid design. I have a zillion sketches of Melody that don’t look at all like how she looks now. It wasn’t until right before her appearance in the comic that I actually decided to refine her character design. Since I had never quite solidified how she looked in my mind, getting her on paper was quite the task. Her hairstyle was already on my mind, but I did a bunch of different versions of her halo and outfits. I put a bunch of designs together and sent them out to my friends to ask them to vote on their favorite outfit to help me decide 😂:

In the end Melody’s outfit didn’t quite look like any of these, because they’re all somewhat complex, and I need things to stay really simple for comics. Once I had designed the outfit the struggle still wasn’t over, cause now I had to do colors. Here’s just a small sampling of the color pallets I went through:

I guess if I was gonna break down my process into steps, it would be like this:

1. Sketch a bunch of ideas based on vibes

2. Choose my fav and then refine it further by tweaking the outfit/hair ect

3. Try out a lot of different colors and keep adjusting them until they look right

4. Give birth to my Art Child 💃✨🙌

I don’t always do all that, and some of the design processes for certain characters happen a little differently. But that’s basically it! Sorry this was super long, I hope it helped!!