The beginnings of Character Design

There is a story to what needed to happen for me to voluntarily stick my head in character design work for Dovenkar, and I'm not proud of all of it. In the spirit of being as open as possible about my flaws, I would lay out here all of the ways in which I mistreated my good friend, how I was admonished by another for it, how I reconnected with him over my first attempts at some design ideas on Christmas day of 2021.  It's not a very exciting tale, but it means a lot to me. Doven, I don't know what makes you like me sometimes. But I'm very grateful for you. And Breezy. Keep on bonking me.

The meat of the matter is the honour of representing someone's character. After seeing real human lives flourishing at Eurofurence for the first time after the pandemic, fursonae gained in importance to me. There's real people behind every image. Every life, a world unto its own, infinitely unique and irreplaceable. It makes you wanna cry. And overseas I had a friend who believed in me, with whom I shared history, whose self-representation needed a new coat of paint. Like hell I was gonna let some other artist do that. I would have worked for free if I'd had to, lol. So from the second sketches (the individual body parts), we moved much faster to a real ref sheet. Doven did pay me, so it was all very justifiable work. Haha.

It made me realize that ref sheets aren't quite as painful to do as they seem. I love people. I love talking to them. I love hearing them talk about their characters, what they mean to them, and often have my own thoughts about what I hear. For instance here, Icereach's character Faise is a pilot who has been burned by space wasp acid, and I'm informed he's not the best at his job thanks to his interest in, urm, more bodily activities. I wanted him to look confident and sensual, and ended up getting attracted to him so much that I got a little frustrated that he was just a bunch of pixels I was arranging on a screen xD Getting paid to listen and to translate that essential spirit of the character is joyful, hopefully joyful enough to make up for all the editing, haha. And after everything, it's about getting your hands dirty and touching some metaphorical grass. The real economy of furry art does not revolve around my fancy, half-formed ideas. Much of the art being made has a conventional purpose - and sometimes, it's healthy to reconnect to that truth. Not just to make a living, but to even know what people are looking for.

In the future, I intend to look further into Creature Design. I will never be a Terryl Whitlach, but she does have a Schoolism course I will go through. Aaron Blaise got me as far as this, now it's her turn to show me how to control every facet of the anatomy bit by bit, and what qualities each can impart. And Bobby Chiu will help with the rendering so that my fur, feathers, skin and scales won't be so much of an amateurish mess anymore. I have a feeling that all of that will end up being very helpful for the more spiritual artwork I plan on doing anyways :P