#debated on long pigtails but decided against.

[rotyolk]

brazilian miku butchification beeeeeaaaaaamm

[lemonlimestar]

i absolutely adore your designs! id love to hear about your process for making characters who look similar in canon have unique and identifiable features!!

tysm :,) i’ve always been really into character design so it’s fun to translate that into characters i love.

as for making similar looking characters look different i drew up a little lineup.

this is gonna be a long one sjhdjsjs

cassie, steph, and mia are all beloved white, blonde, *skinny, teenage girls with roughly the same appearance so i decided to focus in on them.

(*they’re usually portrayed as being muscular/fit but nowhere near in same fashion as their male counterparts)

i wish there was a fancier way to put it, but honestly i just play around with shape language until i get a design i like. i try to lean into motifs/commonalities. (ex: the robins have larger noses to be sort of bird-like, cissie has a heart face to tie into the connection between archery & cupid, the house of el s-curl, cassie’s pigtails are shaped like stars) overall, doing lineups like these are really helpful when trying to make characters look different because it shows you a side-by-side of all the similarities & differences in how i draw the characters.

especially when they interact a lot (ex: wally & roy, kon & tim, cissie & greta) i don’t want them looking like siblings or to repeat the same features between characters who already look similar. unless i’m playing into that (dick & donna <3)

when changing race or body types, i try to factor in the actual character & their backstory. i tend to draw cassie stockier because of her more brawler-like fighting style + her being one of shorter yj kids. but also, i made greta chubby both because i thought it worked well with her shape language and i simply wanted to. the world is my oyster.

as for race, i’m a lot more careful about thinking about how being non-white would affect a character. i have to know a decent amount about a character before hitting them with The Self-Indulgence Beam. making a character black, brown, or asian shouldn’t be slapped on like a sticker without any care put into it. i feel like it’s a well-known point, but it’s worth mentioning especially because i’m black & i make so many characters non-white when i draw them.

back to canon portrayals, they’re some unique features given to them (ex: steph’s freckles aren’t always drawn but they do get featured a few times) so i try to make things like that a permanent physical feature. the curls were simply inspired by some other stephs i’ve seen :) i typically hc that she straightens & crimps them when she’s a teenager but i drew her with them for this example. i got very self-indulgent with my steph design because she’s my girl, but i also tried to keep in mind how she complements the people she interacts with the most (cass, tim, babs).

although i’ve enjoyed what i’ve read with her, i know the least about mia. so, i just gave her features i’d like to see more on teenage characters like acne. i pulled from some panels for the shape of her nose and adjusted the shade of her hair about a million times. i debated on giving her piercings, but ended up going against it because she doesn’t have invulnerability nor a full face mask & she doesn’t have piercings in any of the panels i saw of her.

although i’m not the hugest fan of the reveal of cassie secretly being a demigod rather than just having been given her powers, her being not entirely human gives me a little bit more leeway with her design in my head. hence the stark blonde in her lashes being inspired by fantasy design i enjoy.

one more thing i almost forgot was scars. obviously heroes with no powers would have more visible scars. just with the bats: they all have body scarring but i draw cass with more facial scars because of her history + she’s herself so she wouldn’t bother covering them v.s. tim, who doesn’t have visible facial scars bc he’s Very Particular about appearances, but he has a crooked nose.

scars can be fun to play with as far as trying to remember what happens to certain characters that would leave them scarred (cissie’s scar where the arrow went through her, any scars kon got from literally dying, wally’s or barry’s scarring from their “accidents”) they’re an interesting trait to add & reflects the whole vigilantism thing.

okay i think that’s all the thoughts i have. ik this got kinda rambley but i hope it was helpful 😭

here are some closeups, as a treat <3

[livwritesstuff]

2003, established relationship, dads!steddie w/ 2yo daughter

The afternoon that Steve and Ed get a phone call that changes their life starts out with Steve at home alone, Ed having taken Moe to a park nearby for a while so Steve could have some time to go over his schedule of clients for the week and get all his notes organized.

He’s finished now, though, and working on throwing lunch together, and Ed’s pretty good with the timing of this kind of thing so he and Moe should be back any second.

Indeed, only a few minutes later, Steve hears the door open as Ed lets himself and Moe in.

“Bug, I promise I’m not trying to help you,” Ed is saying, and Steve can’t help a snort (the first month of Moe’s terrible twos had proven itself to be less terrible and more an ongoing debate over what she could and couldn’t do by herself; the second month is shaping up to be much of the same), “Maybe I just don’t want to watch you plummet back down the stairs we just spent five minutes walking up. Forgive me. You’re a very big girl and don’t ever need help with anything. Noted. Understood.”

A moment later, Moe barrels into the kitchen.

“Papa!” she exclaims, crashing into his legs.

Steve swings her up into his arms, and she immediately buries her face in the neckline of his t-shirt.

“You have fun?” he asks. He feels her nod against his shoulder, “You gonna take a long nap for daddy while I’m at work.”

She shakes her head.

“Weird — something tells me you might.”

Ed appears a few moments later.

“How was it?” Steve asks him.

“I spent twenty minutes watching that kid try to step onto the curb,” Ed replies with a grin, “She’s fantastic. How long until you have to head out?”

“Another hour or so,” he tells him as he sits Moe down in her booster seat at the kitchen table and runs a hand over her blonde hair (it’s just long enough to put into little pigtails now, which is so so cute, and Steve definitely sees bangs in her future once it gets a little longer).

“Excellent. How are we tricking the child into eating vegetables today?”

“There’s squash and cauliflower and the orange one she knows the name of in the mac and cheese sauce,” Steve replies. 

(With Moe’s vocabulary increasing exponentially, he and Ed are finding themselves speaking in weird vegetable-related code more and more while they decide how they’d like to navigate a phase of picky-eating she’d recently entered. Steve has been doing his best to sneak vegetables into as much of her food as he can get away with in the meantime, but he has a feeling that Moe might be catching on).

Once Moe is settled in with her lunch, Steve heads upstairs to get dressed for work and fix his hair. When he returns to the kitchen, he finds that the dishes have been cleared into the sink and Ed is using half a cookie to bribe Moe into telling him that the square root of nine is three — not because she actually understands the math, obviously (she’s only just started being able to differentiate one number from the next), but since she learned (memorized) one plus one equals two, Ed has been on a crusade to find the most complicated equation she could memorize the answer to. She now gives a confident Twelve in response to What’s three times four? and he’s apparently moved on to square roots (which might be too big a leap, Steve thinks, but only time will tell).

“Damn, Ed, if math was this important to you back in high school you might’a graduated on time,” he says, running a hand over Ed’s shoulders.

“Oh, fuck off. Do you know how much money Holly makes?” Ed asks, tipping his head back to look up at him, “Nancy told me how much money that kid makes. She’s twenty-three years old and making an absurd amount of money, Steve. Sue me for wanting our kid to develop some profitable proclivities.”

Steve shakes his head as he lifts Moe out of her seat, rescuing her from her dad’s flights of arithmetical fantasy.

When the phone rings (with the call that changes his and Ed’s life a second time), Steve is sitting on the ground with his back against the fridge watching as Moe plays with the colorful, plastic magnetic alphabet letters stuck to the stainless steel (“stainless my ass,” Ed had once muttered while trying to wipe Moe’s little fingerprints off the metal). Most of the letters have been shifted up to Steve and Ed’s eye level after months of spelling out multicolored messages to each other — currently, some of them are spelling buY mORe EgGs (Steve’s doing), with no fUck u (Ed’s) underneath.

Ed, standing at the sink and carefully scrubbing a cast-iron pan, is closer to the phone so he doesn’t hesitate to reach for it.

“Hey, this is Ed,” he says. A moment later, he turns and levels an eyebrow at Steve, “Oh, hi Lorraine. How’re you?”

There’s a pause, Ed’s face relaxing while he listens to Lorraine. After only a moment or two, his eyebrows shoot up.

“Oh…shit.” 

continue on A03