Developing my World

Baby steps! I thought I’d swing by and upload a few more pictures of the notes I’ve made, and talk about the research I’ve been doing. I will include some images that have served as inspiration for me as well.

Here is the progress I’ve made the past few days:

I’ve been building on the religions of the world and trying to establish if it should be for sure a real thing, or if its all speculative. Do they have proof of their higher power, Fate? Does she actually exist, or is it something they’ve conjured up? Do people have visions? I decided that their higher power literally, actually exists, and visits the world in significant times and places. Nobody questions her existence. Therefore, how does each culture worship her? Do they worship her? These are questions I have yet to answer.

Here are some images from a folder that I’ve labelled as “inspiration” for my learning project:

It is hard to explain exactly why these images spur my imagination, but they inspire me to create fantastical worlds in which my characters may interact. Moving forward, I’d like to try and sketch out a few characters and try developing more informational profiles first, and then move on to actual art of the characters. That’s all for now.

Thanks for checking in!

What Am I Really Doing?

I want to make my own comic.

Which is why I chose anatomy and diversity in drawing as my learning project.

I’ve been dreaming about this since I was a little kid. My best friend and I would go to the lake together and spend hours upon hours just dreaming up characters in a fictitious world. We used to create maps and design clothes and houses and stories and we would be endlessly caught up in a world of fantastical creatures that we had made up on our own. Now that we’re both older, we’re trying to create our own separate worlds. In some ways they’re very similar, purely because we’ve grown up together for so long that its quite difficult because we too are quite similar.

If this is my end game, then before I can start actually creating characters, I need to have a world established. If I make my characters before I make my world, they may not suit the environment, nor will they make sense in the story. I can’t make a New York Times publisher walk into a world of vampires and dragons. It just wouldn’t make sense.

What this means is that I’m now working on two different strands of my project. I’m practicing my basic drawing skill and anatomy, but I’m also working on creating an environment/universe in which my characters will interact. I cannot have one without the other.

So far in practicing anatomy, I’ve just been occasionally practicing (all over my class notes, in my sketchbook, and sometimes even in my text books) basic foreshortening. A cylinder is a great shape to use for this practice because it generally makes up half of the body. The arms, legs, neck, and even somewhat the torso are cylinders when the body is broken down into basic shapes. Therefore, I’ve been drawing cylinders everywhere. I won’t bore you with twenty pictures of cylinders, so I included my most recent one below. It really isn’t anything special, but it is important to practice drawing these shapes in different perspectives so that when I try to piece them all together, I’ll be able to make a body out of it.

In regards to building a world, I’ve been trying to figure out everything that even needs to be considered in order to create a world. I’ve purchased a few books, my favourite being the image below:

The book is great but there are no visual cues or examples to really go off of, or no recommendations as to exactly how I should organize all of my planning. It recommends everything you need to think of, but makes no recommendations on how to put everything together, which is rather unfortunate I would think. Either way, I jumped face first into my planning.

I had to take into consideration everything. What types of land masses exist, what times of biomes exist, what different kinds of islands are called, what type of faith(s) exist in the world, how the world came to be, and so on. Then, depending on the land mass, the environment, the weather and so on, it changed the kinds of resources available to the people. Did they have electricity? Do they have magic? How do they organize their communities? Is it a patriarchy? Is it a monarchy? Is it ruled by spirits? There are so many things to consider that I’m finding myself overwhelmed.

My notes seem a little strange because I don’t really have names for anything yet, but initials and abbreviations will do for now. Obviously I’m just starting this so of course nothing is supposed to be finished and ready to go. This will be a really long process that could potentially take decades, but I’m in it for the long haul.

In this post I had talked abut how making a list of names can benefit the writer because you can establish cultural connections to the names.  See mine below:

I tried colour-coding based on the different cultures around the world I’m trying to make so that I have a bit of a reference for myself when I start creating characters that are from various places around the world.

This is all I have for now. As usual, thanks for checking in!

 

Making Realistic Characters

In light of my previous post, I’ve done some research on how to make and draw characters that are more believable. The first link that I investigated immediately gave me a lot of insight:

Deeper People: Putting Yourself into Your Characters

(reprinted from Holly Lisle’s Vision: A Writer’s Resource Vol. One, Issue 3 — May/June 2001)

This article was something I saved in my favourites tab years ago when I was taking a creative writing class. I had never read it, but I went back to check it out. Granted, this resource is primarily for writers, but it applies across the board.

Lisle describes the “plague of paper people,” which is her term for flat, non-realistic characters that too easily fall into categories, as they have absolutely zero depth. She wrote, “You have Evil Villains, Oppressed Virginal Heroines, Naive-But-Stalwart Heroes, and Smart-Ass Sidekicks, among other common types.” These characters have purpose that only serve as plot instigators. They are not people, they are plot devices in which their personalities (or lack thereof) serves to move the plot along in predictable ways.

To combat this, she wrote the following:

More than anything else, living characters have passions, hungers and desires, and they aren’t all related to the story of the moment.

In creating character for a story, if they start with the ability required or the skills required to succeed in the story, then you’ve created another paper person. Your characters cannot start with the skills needed to succeed, and they need to have more skills and quirks that are required by the story. They need to have traits that make them human. They need to make mistakes, and by no means can they be perfect for the job. The author writes that the easiest way to avoid this is to put parts of you into every character; not the things your proud of, but the things you want to hide from everybody else. This way, it makes it personal and it makes it real. It immediately gives your character depth, because it gives them a background or quirk that will most likely have nothing to do with the plot.

In order to discover yourself more, the author provides a workshop that I highly recommend:

A. Write ten things about yourself that you think are fantastic things that you don’t think other people really appreciate fully about you, or that they haven’t noticed, or that they simply don’t know about. Ten. Really.

B. Write ten things about yourself that would embarrass you terribly if anyone else knew about them. These can be things you have done, things you have wanted, things you have thought, fantasies you have entertained, or secrets you have been keeping. Doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you tell the truth. If it doesn’t hurt and make you uncomfortable to write each of these, you aren’t digging deep enough.

C. Describe your body as honestly as you can what you like about it, what you hate about it, and what you hope no one has noticed.

D. Describe five of the most wonderful moments of your life things you still look back on with pleasure and joy.

E. Describe five of the most painful moments of your life mistakes you’ve made, people you’ve hurt, things that you will probably regret until you die.

F. Write the ten things you are most passionate about. These can be religious, political, philosophical, personal, romantic—these are your causes. You can be in favor of them, or against them, but they have to matter to you. They don’t have to be big; they just have to be yours.

Her final point in the article is this:

If this isn’t hard for you to do, you aren’t digging deep enough.

Making characters is supposed to be really hard and that’s just a part of the job. For me personally, this article adds an extra challenge in that I have to figure out how to illustrate these things. 

Next article: How to Build a Character 

The author recommends that you create a list of names that you can build from that are relevant to the story. She adds that you must establish the basics (Duh) but you also must consider what that character means to the story. What is their presence or actions in the story mean, symbolically? What does it mean literally? Another great point she adds is that every character that your character interacts with (even if only there for a single moment) must be as developed as every other character, otherwise their actions (even if short and fleeting) will not be believable. Every character must be believable and cannot fall into a T.V. trope. They cannot be another “paper person.”

Next article: This Cheat Site for all the Resources you Need

There isn’t much to say about this resource other than the fact that it contains a plethora of resources for one to use in building a character.

Cheat Sheets For Writing Body Language

This resource is excellent because it highlights something that I never really considered. Body language is a huge part of character building. Every great story I’ve ever read describes the body language of every character in a subtle way that only ever adds to the depth and solidification of that character’s personality.

Its a great resource and it will help me determine what pose to draw my characters in depending on their personality. 

Anyway, this is my preliminary research before I get deeper into designing my characters. These resources were helpful and I hope any aspiring writers out there find something helpful in these links like I did.

Thanks for catching up with me!