by EmergencyExit on Sun Nov 25, 2007 8:20 pm
Well things like weight I don't bother with but some of the others I think really add to the creation of characters. The more you know about your characters, the better you can write for them and the more real they feel. There's plenty of things I know about my characters that'll probably never even get mentioned in comic, just stuff I think of to help build the character.
I do height because I need to know how to draw the characters in comparison to each other. Without that, Bob may be shorter than Jason one day and taller the next, making for unclean inconstancy that is probably easy to find in early comics.
Things like age, ethnicity and even height can all add to the character's personality and how they act. Take Nights for instance, he has a major height complex : P. Darwin in Undead Friend has a bit of one too but for the opposite reason of being insanely tall.
Age is important to know where they all are standing in life, for most of the EE characters it shows they're all for the most part starting out, how old they are might reflect how mature they are. Thing about this though is EE time runs allot slower so the age hardly changes but they will age a bit over time.
Ethnicity is something I am a bit loose on, as I don't draw everyone extremely accurately to their ethnicities. I've been told before Karl doesn't quite look like the average black guy. He's half Hispanic, but that really doesn't justify it if we're talking accuracy. But it's something I've been improving on. I think having a ethnicity in mind for a character helps define how they can be drawn, such as I try to give Jason's more Asian style eyes. It effects the height and body type sometimes too, Jason's half Asian half Caucasian, therefore his height is just a bit under average. There's also other issues about his half heritage but that's for later. Bob's got semi-pale skin and red hair and green eyes, all traits that can be found in people of strong Irish decent. He also speaks in his Irish accent occasionally. It comes down to how much you are into character detail. Characters are my focus in my work, it's usually for my characters more than anything else people get into my comics. So I enjoy flushing them out as much as possible.
So they're can be good reasons for them, I just think it's up to personal taste whether a writer uses them or not, but I don't think it's a silly thing to ever do.
For me I started out just drawing whatever I liked. Guy with green hair, brown skin and dark blue eyes? Sure! But now I try to work reasons into this stuff a bit more, which I found helped me discover allot of interesting things about my characters.
Weight I just find too difficult to calculate, there's so many factors involved : P. I'd more likely just list body type if anything.
Course with characters like Vladic, we have yet to see his full form, his human disguise isn't really any ethnicity as it's made up.
As for having these things listed for the readers, well it can help them understand where the character is coming from a bit better. Also, if someone was to say draw fanart in a different style, they'd have good info to go off on >_>.
Anyway such are my thoughts on that. I'll probably go with one of the suggested ethnicities for Burgundy.
Last edited by
EmergencyExit on Sun Nov 25, 2007 8:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.