Blog: Rosas of the past

With October's Monthly Damsel being a pair of drawings featuring my very own Rosa Raines, I figured it would be a good idea for this week's look into the past to feature her.

I first created the character around 2010--I don't know exactly, because she was actually a fusion of two other characters swimming around in my brain. In 2011, I started playing Nabber's Empire and used her as my character there, so naturally I needed to start having some visual reference. I drew a few really awful sketches and eventually commissioned erikson1 to draw her, which got more eyes on her. A lot of people compared her to Penny Gadget, so I immediately changed her hairstyle to have her twintails higher up.

I took a few things from erikson1's take on the design (mainly the boots and the buttons on the dress) but left out a lot of the other frills because I just couldn't be bothered to draw them all the time. I'd draw art of her every so often, but she'd look a little different almost every time. The two sketches on the left of the image above are from this period (2016-ish)--I'm not sure why I never finished them. Honestly, they don't look too different from what I was actually uploading at the time.

In the meantime, I'd started writing Rosa stories to put on DA. They were an incredible chore to write because the characters and setting just never gelled--plus, I'm terrible at developing mysteries, which is a bit of a problem when you design a detective character.

Rosa would continue making token appearances as my avatar (I think all the color pictures above have been used as that at one point or another), but I lost interest in the stories and eventually removed them altogether. At various points, I considered donating the character to someone else (in fact, Rosa's newest hairstyle as seen in the bottom right was partially the invention of Wadaldo, who really friggin' loves twintails) and even thought about having Nothles write a bad end story just so I could be rid of her forever.

Buuuut at some point, I really got the itch to have something original again, so I took her back and revamped her a little. You'll see the results in the Monthly Damsel pic, but the bottom right sketch here shows part of the development process--I wanted this Rosa to be less cynical and irritable and a bit more ditzy and lewd, hence her pose here. I plan to do more story-based stuff with her sometime in the future, so I've been developing a new setting for her, but I think that's a post entirely of its own.

Next week, I'll dig further into the archives and show off some unused OC designs--I might even do new sketches of some of 'em!

That's all for now. Rosie rolling out!