I’m currently working on a proposal for a comic book alongside my other illustration and design projects. I also made this new website with a blog section. 2+2=4, I decided I’d take you, reader, through the creative process for my comic book project!

I like to write and work on the visual development for the story kinda at the same time. Currently, I have a few designs on the table, and the story’s basic plan is half done. Little steps! But it’s time to go deeper in all this, and to do so, I need to have a clear idea of what my main character’s made of. From the start of the project, I had more or less a vague idea of what he should look like.

The drawing on the left is from over a year ago and is the first drawing I made of him. It makes me want to laugh a bit, but looking at it again made me able to point out the things that don’t really correspond to my vision of the character in the second drawing (which is from a few days ago). It’s like… each of these designs have points that made me go : « yeah! that’s what he looks like! » and some that made me go « errr… that’s not quite it. »

So! Back to the drawing table! I think I kinda got more or less what I wanted from the design, which was what I needed to go to this next part…

(Sorry, my sketches aren’t very clean) I wanted to work on this part of the character because it’s putting down a good part of his personality, which is going to help me write him in the story. I asked myself : how does he live these emotions?

We all move a bit differently, according to our individuality. This character is a child (he’s like twelve, I think), who’s been sheltered for parts of his life and left completely on his own when the story picks up. He also grows up in a troubled environment. I tried to convey that, but I might still have some work to do…

I think figuring out how the character reacts to things, how he moves and how he talks is all linked together. To properly write the story (as in, write the actual scenes with dialogue and everything), I want to know these things… for all of the main characters!

The last part, the eyes, is a bit more of a practice for me : expressive eyes aren’t exactly my forte, and I need to work on that…

Anyways, there’s still loads of work to do on this character design: I haven’t done a model sheet for uniformity, haven’t done serious work on the costumes… Next time! Maybe?