Character Design Process - Bufraeva

Bufraeva is a god in my webcomic (or the "original" god). While no one remembers the exact specifics of what he looked like, people remember that he had a strong association with hands (though others might claim he was associated more with eyes). This belief is so important to people that they began wearing gloves as a sign of religious respect.

I first attempted to design him in July 2020. At the time, I was pleased with the results and thought the symmetry of his design helped make him feel a little uncanny in some ways. However, there were several aspects of it that I eventually found to either not make sense or be too annoying to draw consistently. For example, the idea of his torso being covered entirely by hands and arms was really interesting. But when you look at it, it's hard to make heads or tails of what's going on, not to mention it looks a little on the messy side. There's also his very few bird-like features. While they are very important to his design as a whole, the way and amount at which I integrated them could've been a little bit more cohesive. It's this bird-like feel that ended up being the hardest thing to integrate into his design.

Initial design for Bufraeva (July 2020)

And so, I set out to try and figure out how on Earth to iron out this design. I started off by drawing some possible silhouettes for him. I wanted to see if I could get a general idea of what shape he could be or what made the most sense for him. This wound up difficult. The silhouette closest to his final design is the one in the middle segment that's furthest to the right.

Initial silhouette brainstorming (Spring 2022)

After attempting to find a silhouette that suited him, I sketched some more possible body types and outfit types. By this point, I'd ironed out that I wanted him to still be pretty weird. I also knew there were a few constraints I had to work with (bird-like, earrings, four pairs of arms). To achieve a bit more of a bird-like look, I tried giving him a longer neck and making it slightly feathered. I kept his bird feet because they were straightforward and got to the point quickly. At this point, I also started experimenting with how his arms looked. In the original design from 2020, I made all his arms look normal. Here, though, I realized that I had a big opportunity to make his arms be really interesting. I began trying to fuse them with wings (think how the "fingers" in bat wings look in particular). This detail is particularly important because Bufraeva was once full-on winged and feathery. He began essentially self-mutilating when he started trying to get closer to humanity again, wanting to understand them better. This is a process he has to do relatively frequently (his arms still want to be wings), which is why his fingers are at varying lengths.

Also at this point, I started trying to figure out how to make him look regal. The first step for this was to adjust his hair. While the ponytail in the original design is charming in its own way, I thought that it could be interesting for him to have long, flowing hair. This led me to wondering what it could be like for him to have stars or something reflected in his hair, which in turn led me down a very important road: integrating astronomical instruments into his design.

Sketchbook sketches (Spring 2022)

Sketches (Spring 2022)

I fleshed out the rest of his design while working on a large illustration of him and wound up fairly pleased with the result!

Final design/illustration (Summer 2022)

His head, the placement of his arms, and his legs remain the biggest similarities between this design and the original. The addition of clothes, though, added a lot of flavor to his design that wasn't there before! My goal was for him to appear more regal, which was made possible by the intricacies of his outfit.

It's possible to see the biggest pieces of his outfit in this picture. On the leftmost portion of this screenshot (around his neck), there's a design similar to those of an astrolabe. To its right, in the next segment, the pattern references something called an alidade. The way I laid out this portion is also meant to be very similar to a pattern another one of my characters typically wears. Lastly, on the right, there are moon phases.

A zoomed-in screenshot of Bufraeva's neck and shoulders

The last important piece of his design is unfortunately impossible to see in this piece because his face is in profile, but I sketched it out here. He has a sort of crown that also references astronomical tools.