Two Requirements

I don’t want it to be a full biography or analysis of my puppetscharacters, because that would kind of spoil the story itself for some of the new-ish readers¹.

One of the most fun parts of a story is to get to know the characters, to find out what makes them tick, what makes them strong and what makes them break. Plus,  putting down character biographies would require me to do the whole biography-writing ahead and seperated from story developement, which kinda sucks. I fail at working with rigid chars – I want the freedom and flexibility to insert important-even-Z somewhere in a chars past.

But a picture with a character name alone won’t be enough, either.

The cast page has to serve as a reminder of who’s who, if a character hasn’t been in play for a few weeks – or maybe months. Long-time readers will turn to the cast page when they don’t quite remember who’s who. They need a short but meaningful description to go with the pictures, something to jogg their memories.

How much character description do I need?

A picture, a name and a short description might be enough for somebody like Dandra.

“Dandra Steelpaw, Chalcara’s closest confediate, her high-priestress and Elder of a small sect called Whispers²” would work, provided I formulate it better than that. Rhii, Rell and the other sidecharacters might need even less.

But what do I do with my protagonists³?

In lieu of a non-existing about page, they’ll kinda be the introduction of the story. That requires a bit more details, maybe one or two paragraphs. But what should I write? So far nothing has really worked out for me.

Do, does anybody have any  suggestions? Or maybe a link to a castpage that you feel is well done?

Halp?

Siendes & Mona - Raw Sketch

Remember when I’ve told you that I work in iterations?

This particular picture is a great example of how the very first iteration looks. Mona’s eyes and mouth are skewed, her arm isn’t right, the her neckline’s off – among others problems. Things like this are common in my sketches, it’s not as if I’d get it right on the first time.

But what I DID get down – and that’s the actually important part – is their facial expressions (I especially love Siendes) and body language. The idea has been finalized and the rest is window dressing. The foundation is laid.

It’s unlikely I continue to work on this picture, but if I would the next step would be to construct the anatomy of the torsos and heads right and look for references if necessary. That’s when I start redrawing things over and over until they’re either to my liking or piss me off so much I refuse to work any further on them. ;)

The inks of Chally. Yay! :D

The sketch!

This will be a companion piece to the Bust of Siendes I did a few weeks ago. I plan to use both of them on Traces of Chaos‘ castpage.

This particular sketch is actually the fifth iteration¹ of this portrait, and I propably need one more in order to fix her cheekbones.

I enjoy putting so much work into a simple lineart once in a while – it’s the later iterations that make a sketch come alive, because then I have fussed out the basics and can push the details. And it’s always those tiny, hard to see details which pull an image together. It costs alot of times though, which means I can’t do that many iterations on a comic page itself.

A quick lineart of young Siendes.  I plan to run some simple colouring tests on it. I know what kind of colouring style I want, I now just need to find a faster way to achieve those effects.