Original characters from a book that has jet to get a name.
My friend and I are writing a story. We started working on it for fun while we were working our parttime job. By now we've been working on the story for about 6 years and we're wondering if we're ever going to finish it. It's supposed to be an intricate story about a romance set in the past.
In this post, I'll get back to the character designs of our four main characters. Especially their colour schemes.
To start the redesign/recolouring of our characters, I looked at their first appearance. They first appeared in 2015, when we first started writing the story.
At this point, I had discovered 'Otome games' so I used a lot of references from those games as inspiration. This is also when I started to dabble in 'digital art'.
These are the colours the characters would get if I were to draw them now. They would all have the same blue eyes and brown hair. The reason for this was that they were all based on the same object. We decided to change this.
I made colour swatches for all four of the characters and discussed these with my friend.
(Ers.)
(Sor.)
(Pou.)
(Ces.)
For the character 'Ces' my friend didn't agree with the eyes. So I tried some different options. We still decided on my original idea (7) because I thought they fit his character.
The hairstyle of 'Ces' has also changed a few times. I always pictured him with long hair while my friend pictured him with shorter hair. We compromised and chose nr. 14
For the girl character 'Pou' I just played around with her hair because I like drawing long hair/hairstyles.
After we both decided on the colour combinations we liked the most I put all the characters together in one picture. This way we could decide if all the characters looked like they came from the same universe.
As you can see, my version still resembles the original version I showed you at the beginning. I decided I had to compromise more.
This is the final version of the characters we decided on.
Next up, clothing.
I asked my friend if she'd like to do some research on the clothing. This way, she was more involved with the design process. From her findings, I made some options for the three men.
(Sor is inspired by French fashion)
(Ces is inspired by Italian fashion)
(Ers is inspired by Swedish fashion)
Eventually, I placed all the characters next to each other as if they would get their picture taken. Again I played around with the colours and had some fun with 'the red string of fate'.
This illustration marked the end of the project.