Rebound

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Bootleg: Character design

reboundcomic

on Nov. 16, 2008

The new strip will appear on Tuesday, but I thought a few of you might get a kick out of my creative process. In this case new character design.

I tend to spend a lot more time trying to design female characters than the male character because I have a harder time drawing women characters than men and even with a lot of practice I still have huge inconsistencies.

In all cases I come up with who the character is first. I don’t want to give too much away but this character, is supposed to be sexy and a little dangerous.

The first thing I do is choose a head shape. In some cases I am very consistent in the shape of the head, Billy’s square jaw and Mindy’s peanut shaped heads the most notable. In other cases you’ll notice they change a lot, the best examples are Fletcher the past 20 strips and Dave, the guitarist in Billy’s band.

In the case of this character, who I have dubbed Emily, her head shape is essentially an upside down tear drop. Knowing who she is in Billy’s world I decided she needed to be sort of goth/emo. I tried drawing her hair from memory, which you can see some traces of in the first few sketches. Without liking those results I Googled “emo hair” and started drawing different varieties in the Group 1 drawings, which were all done over the course of about three hours on the same night.

Two days later I did group 2. These were done without photo reference and half distracted as I was talking on my radio show. In group two I was stll tweaking the hair, but you can also see me trying to figure out her nose and eyes. I know that I want her to have very thick, dark eye make up but have not decided about her nose.

I’ll keep working on the design up until the character runs (which is only a handful of strips away, probably 3-4 weeks) and you will be able to see some more small changes in her design.