Character Design - Selena, and the Art of Making Successful Fake Wives (Patreon)

It's been a minute since the last post, mainly because I've been working on getting this one together. I originally planned to make a post detailing the process of making character designs, but after a friend offered to invest in the book for illustrations, I decided to take it a step further.

Because I can never simply accept people's financial help, I made an entire "investor presentation" to settle any doubts that their money would be wasted on poor decisions. After OBS issues lost the audio from it, I gave an encore presentation to the D&D group I DM for, forcing them to listen to my insane rambling before I let them play. This video is an edited recording of that presentation.

It's more of a panel than a business-type presentation so expect to be entertained (hopefully) and learn something about character design while you're at it. I'll be adding some addendums that better state and organize the talking points.

One more thing, I'm currently in the process of making the first draft of book 2. After which, I'll be making a final rewrite of book 1 based on feedback I've been getting from Patrons and other readers. Look forward to that sometime late next month or so.

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So anyway, character design.

Selena

I imagine multiple people have asked "Why do you need to go through this much effort to make character designs for a novel?" The answer is, in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-twice, people are super attached to the characters they like and will go to great lengths for them.

You can look at that year Overwatch was inescapable for proof of that. Overwatch is a booty-ass, butt, dookie game, but people bought and played the game so they could play as their favorite characters, despite many of them not being big into FPS games, or usually playing that character's role, or even likening competitive, online, multiplayer experiences. There where lots of people begging for a PvE or single-player mode to be added so they could play as their favorite characters without low competitive skill or poor team composition ruining their fun.

It would be negligible to say "nobody reads books anymore" but it would be equally  negligible to say "I have full confidence in myself to transition into, and break out in a written medium considering the modest success I've had in audio-visual mediums." I need a hook to bring my animation crowd and the common internet user into my circle, and appealing characters, specifically, a dripped out demon hot girl is the best way to do so in my opinion.

People love them a demon girl, and if I nail the design of Selena, she'll do most of the advertising for me.

Flagship Girls

There's been an uptick in popular anime about the misadventures of hot girls and their male, audience stand-in sidekick going through slice-of-life shenanigans, and accidently finding themselves in suggestive situations. I imagine that's what someone who hasn't read "Third Eye," but hears its premise might think the series might be like, and it wouldn't a terrible idea to take from those anime to gain what appeal they have to their fans.

In the presentation I bring up that they mostly share the same anime face, and use a template to prove it. While this does illustrate my point,  "thing on template, therefore all the same and also bad" has become too commonplace in angry internet echo chambers, so it muddies the message. The point wasn't to say the characters are generic or have bad designs, clearly they don't because many people like them a lot, it was to highlight the lesser importance of faces in character design.

Don't talk to fishermen online.

Chosen Girls

Likewise, the point of highlighting these characters wasn't to say "This is what real character design looks like," it was to show what people tend to gravitate towards when they aren't given a waifu on series entry.

People have a preference for characters that have a place in the story that allows them to perform at their best. They're the characters people like for reasons beyond their bodies, they like their attitudes or mannerisms and behaviors. They like the contrasts they have to the rest of the cast and the world or environment they're in both on a physical and personal level.

I wouldn't say they're "more developed characters" either. Some of them are very minor characters with only a few lines and a theme they repeat in every situation. Their appeal comes from how well they do what they do, and are used just sparingly enough that people get hooked and demand more. Balancing those aspects with flagship girl prominence is the best way to make a best girl.

Trans rights.

Faces

Artstyle is what gives uniqueness to faces in art. It's why anime characters have similar characteristics (big eyes, line mouths, ect.) but all look distinct based on series. When a series doesn't invest in major differences in faces, they usually separate them with one or more tiny changes like more lines in the nose or eyes, slight changes in the spacing of features, accessories like glasses or makeup, blemishes, or an expression that stays mostly present at all times.

The rest of the heavy lifting is done by hair and in most cases, clothing. These all work in tandem to create distinct characters and avoid "sameface." It's not much, but it doesn't have to be if your more focused on differences in personality or even bodies. Just, don't make the only differences in bodies boob size.

Clothing

The focus for all outfits in "Third Eye" is making an iconic look that tells the character's story for them. I constantly keep a platitude from the extremely talented Jorge Gutierrez in mind where he said anyone should be able to look at a character standing still, and know what they're about from that alone.

That's not his exact words and I can't find the tweet he said that in, but if you look at his characters, you do get that. The man is a paragon of using every part of the character-buffalo to make designs that slap hard. That's what I want to go for.

That's why it's important for Selena to have clothing that looks good and hot, but not outright horny. When a character's clothing is designed only to show off their body, what does that tell you about them? Being a sex worker is a single part of Selena's character, it would have influence on what she wears when working, but there's also her tastes, how she choses to present herself, how she feels about her customers, how she feels about herself, what she likes to wear, what she doesn't like to wear, ect. It would say more about the designer than her if she only wore outfits designed with fanservice in mind.

These are only rough mockups, and I'm already wanting to change them to shift pieces around add more unnecessary punk elements.

I should also mention I cut a lot out from the original recording during the comparison of the "Dislite" character and the "Orc Massage" character, as it felt way too slut shame-ey to bash the design I didn't like for being too boner-forward. It's totally incorrect that nobody would want to dress like NSFW-at-W Elf Girl CEO, and it's not my place to judge anyone that would.

It also felt dumb knocking an outfit of a character clearly designed for a porn game for being dressed like that. However, I will not apologize for pointing out the anti-look that is an entire exposed buttcheek. Bare asses are not a look. There are just some things that can not be a look.

Hair

I didn't make it clear enough in the presentation, but Selena's hair is supposed to give her the look of a poisonous, defensive animal. I've been playing around with ideas of adding bright red, or even neon pink to the tips of her hair-hooks and streaks of it down her horns to emulate the stinger of something telling you not to fuck around, or you will find out.

I also have always liked the idea of her having a hime-cut with a part for her third eye, and that thing where the outside of the hair is one color, and the inside is another. I'd like to play around with that.

Features

I think the best way to have a character truly become iconic is for them to be so distinct, someone can describe them verbally and they can be identified immediately. That's pretty important for Selena, being a red-skinned demon girl in the vast ocean of demon girls found on twitter dot com. She needs to be identifiable in a crowd of all the other demon girls easily.

Three eyes and markings aren't the most unique feature there is, usually you'd think of something along the lines of a bizarre appendage or in the most extreme cases, a body that subverts humanoid bipedal shapes. Selena has the unfortunate case of being the first of the rest of inhuman characters. You know, when a series is based around the existence of an inhuman race, and the one that shows up first is more akin to humans or normal animals than the rest of the species?

I swear that's a thing. I'm not crazy. It happens in cartoons all the time and not just because they were the first ones the designed or had a smaller budget during the first episodes, I swear.

She's like that as to be a gateway to the rest of the demons. Something familiar, having a human shape and only a few monstrous features to ease the reader into more out there designs, like that one with the two bodies.

So the plan is to make her eyes as striking as possible with the third one doing most of the work. The dark markings and black sclera make the glow of her yellow eyes more prominent. The third eye never blinks or emotes. It's hard like glossy plastic and stares holes into whatever it's looking at. Just enough strangeness to differentiate her from a red, human woman with horns and a tail.

Characterization

Jokes aside, the theme and VA thing really do make writing and characterization way easier, especially if your creative process uses more visualization like me. Or if you're a big, fucking dork. Also like me.

Not really much else to say outside of telling you to go subscribe to Kennie J.D.  Then listen to Everlong and try not to think about it being about blowjobs.

That's about it. This was actually a lot of fun to make, and I'd love to do some of these for the rest of the cast. I'll try to have that done sooner than later so I'm not randomly disappearing for two months.

As always, I appreciate you all and hope you're enjoying the book.