These last days I have been working on a character I had never drawn before but who already has a lot of lore behind her in my universe. Her name is “Agatha Von Cipher”, will go more into detail about her as a character when I post her standalone character sheet, as this entry is mostly about the character development process.
I enrolled in a quick character design course which was more directed at an industry pipeline type of development and as such, I decided to make the whole process with a character I had never made a visual representation of, here are the steps taken along the way for this character. Will post the last bit of her individual character reference sheet shortly after this one goes up.
Before starting it is worth pointing out that the lore of this character was already there, I already know what her whole personality, goals, purpose, flaws, abilities, and overall attributes are, and at least in my character creation process that is the utter most important thing to have before actually getting to draw a character, or at least in my very specific case of my own world building where I am a writer first, and illustrator/artist second, at least in regards to all the elements of my universe… If I get hired to do a commission I will of course be and artist first of course!
But anyways, the process itself began by gathering and putting together a reference board, get the overall feeling of the character through references, referencing is very important be it for poses, gestures, themes, scenarios, bits and pieces you want to get, tho you gotta be careful because one thing is referencing and being inspired by something, and another very bad one is copying, hence why I never reference myself from less than 10 sources when creating a character, I put together a board that gives me the feeling of the character and its attributes which means the board basically included many scalie faces, real life cowboy hats, sci-fi armours that have a more or less “retro” feeling to them, fantasy type swords, real and sci-fi revolvers, etc. I am not posting the reference board as it contains 30 different images from either actual artists or real life photos and I do not want to post stuff that isn’t mine or that I did not have permission to post, hence why I am keeping that board private as it was only meant to be used for referencing the overall feeling of this character, but do know that referencing was the very first step of the process.
With that out of the way, I went over to the iteration phase where I drew 11 different variations of Agatha, I had posted these on my Twitter not so long ago, each one of them represents a different version of her while still maintaining a “core” of who she is as a character, so each drawing iteration here has slight differences from the others, be it a different hat, sword, gun, armor, tail design, the faces are overall similar but with slight changes, etc. Based on the feedback I got in class, a pose was selected, tho some small elements from one or two of the other iterations were taken into account and implemented for the next phase.
Her tail placement also changed to not have it in-between her legs but to the side instead as to not look so weird when in silhouette lmao, otherwise it would seem as if she had a huge di…
So the next thing that had to be done was doing colour tests, here I struggled hard because I honestly already had pinned it down to just 5 that I couldn’t decide on, so having to make 5 more of them for the assignment was really tedious and at the end of the day I ended up using the green colour scheme because it reminded me of Doomguy :3
Worth noting that colour scheme 1 is based on Caleb from Blood, 2 is based on honey/mustard sauces (I was eating fried chicken with mustard and honey when thinking about the colour schemes, so yes, colour scheme 2 and 6 are based on condiments/sauces lmao), 3 is based on the Comedian from Watchmen (More or less ofc, you really have to do some mental gymnastics to actually see the colour resemblance), 4 is based on Fallout’s Vault Boy, and 5 is based in Doomguy (Doom 1 and 2 ofc).
I had a hard time choosing between these 5, tho it basically came down to a discarding process where I left 3 and 4 out because I already have a distinctively blue character, that being Kate the bluebird ofc, then I discarded 2 because as much as I like honey and mustard, Agatha lives in a desert and while it would be smart to wear something that can be used as some sort of camouflage, from a design standpoint if I wanted to draw her in her “natural habitat”, she would merge with the environment, much like Quake 1’s enemies, so nah, this might be used as an alternate canon armor, but for design purposes with her overall environment I needed her to be eye catchy and stand out from her usual background, even if in practical lore terms it was an odd choice, although some light shades of green could still work as camouflage in certain deserts… Still, scheme 2 might be used in the future tbh. Scheme 1 I really wanted to keep but I do not want her to fall into the “Oooh edgy! Lmao” category since she is more of a carefree and easy going character, this scheme with its reds and all was based on Caleb from Blood, and even tho I might actually keep this along with the mustard and honey one as alternative “skins”, I rather not make it the main one, I will at one point make a drawing of her in the black armor variant if only because I know rendering would make it look really badass in my opinion.
That left me with scheme 5 to be the one I went with, and I liked it because again, it reminded me of Doomguy!
I made some adjustments to her tail which I didn’t like so I turned it back for the next step, also tested her silhouette out, keeping an eye on main shapes (big, medium, small shapes, all that), and I liked the result! You can clearly recognize her from silhouette alone and I am quite thrilled about it! Next step was making Call-outs of her props, so some views of her hat, DE GON, and the sword were made, also quite useful as blueprints if I ever do try to make her into a 3D character (The only thing that has been stopping me from making 3D characters is that I can’t make hair (hair, not fur), that I am satisfied with, it is soooooo hard to translate my specific 2D hair into 3D…)
I also drew her without her hat if only to check out how she looked, and made a variation of this callout pic without colour to showcase the line art and its values, I looooove inking!
Then I did the 8-point turn-around, a normal one, and a variation where she doesn’t have hair, tail, and the arm is separate on the sideview, this so when I do make her into a 3D character, I can actually see every single detail of it, which will be important when modelling/sculpting the character. The hat is not included in the turn around as it was already called out on the previous pic, so no need to put it here.
And finally, I made the final ref sheet, rendered the main pose but left the back pose, the expressions, and the bust as flat colours, added a colour pallet and even included a version of the back view without the tail or the hair so it could be seen in detail.
The final actual reference sheet I will release will not have this alt back view tho, since I do not really think it is necessary when you already have the 8 point turn around in my opinion, still, it was a good exercise to do!
And that is basically it, what a big wall of text lmao, but oh dam, I loved working on this character… Looking forward to using her more in the future!
