Character Design Process - Lani

Graduation has allowed me to once again focus and buckle down on my personal project, Where the Heart Is, far more than I've been able to over the past several months. I've been planning on starting to release it in August of this year, but before I do that, I thought it'd be wise to create character sheets for some of the more prominent characters. I started with Lani, my main character.

Lani is interesting and different in that she isn't from the same area as the other characters. The technology in her homeland is also far more modern than that of the other characters, which means I had to take a different approach when designing her as opposed to the others.

Initial sketches

While Lani is a character I've had since high school, I've never been happy with her design, so I took this as an opportunity to double check her facial proportions and shapes. There were a few things that I knew I wanted to keep in her design: her angular, square-ish face shape, the mole beneath her left eye, and her freckles. Her face shape and freckles are important because they link her to a trait that a certain race in the story traditionally have. Freckles also represent being blessed by the gods in my story, which is very important for Lani as a character. Her square jaw also serves as a way to show that she's grounded and not that soft of a person. This is contradicted a bit by the shape of her nose, which is rounded, implying that she's got some friendliness to her beneath her cold, aloof exterior.

I played around a little bit with the general volume and length of her hair. In the past, I'd waffled between having it cut off above or below her shoulders, but it's always been kept in the same general style. I tried to edge it a little towards the unkempt side of things and tweaked her eyebrows to also be a little bit messy since she's on the run from a cult (not to mention she doesn't care much about appearances to begin with–she's practical, not fashionable). During this stage, I also realized that it was important to figure out what emotions she's comfortable expressing, something that I'll go into more detail on later in this post.

Lastly, I wanted to keep her proportions similar to how I've always envisioned them! She's got long legs and is generally spindly. Her thinness implies that she may not have solid access to food and other such things. I also made her posture a tiny bit hunched and made her pigeon-toed.

Finalized "default" design

The real challenge came with her outfit. She lives in a rainy, somewhat modern city that's comparable to Chicago, and her jacket has always been a very crucial part of her design and backstory so I didn't want to get rid of it. Her initial design (which you can see on the far left) was a bit bland, however, and had no interesting tidbits. To remedy this, I experimented with clothing that went hand in hand with her job: being a small-time florist. This meant experimenting with things like an apron and pouches for her to store tools. Ultimately, I had her wear her apron over her jacket.

With regard to the jacket, I realized that a way to make it look interesting would be to add patches onto it. I came up with a few different ideas for patches, each of them having roots in some other common elements in my character designs. The patches she's wearing specifically refer to two other incredibly important characters. It was also important for me to note that it was incredibly unlikely that she would add patches onto her jacket herself since she'd be worried about ruining it, not to mention it was her missing older sibling's jacket. Therefore, it was that missing sibling who put the patches on and those patches are things that are in their taste, not necessarily Lani's. I also gave her a hood, something that most corduroy jackets don't have, which means she clipped it on herself!

The final parts of her design are her pants and boots. I attempted to make the pants look a little ill-fitting by making them baggier than I ordinarily would. Her boots are rainboots, which work far better for her environment than the hiking boots she originally had.

Fancy outfit sketches

Next, I began sketching possible alternate outfits for her. She travels quite a bit in the story and as I said before, she comes from a very different place than the rest of the cast. This meant that I had to take into account how her fashion sense would change or stay the same when confronted with another culture and environment entirely while making sure that I kept the design feeling like her. Aitaran, the place where the story takes place for the most part, is a country that has a lot of roots in wild west culture and 1800s Spanish and French culture (which is particularly prevalent in richer areas). I wanted her design to utilize some of the fashion motifs that I already had going with other characters.

It's important to note that this particular outfit is one that was gifted to her by a rich person. Therefore, I leaned into making it look a bit closer to being on the fancy side of things and not as wild west-y. I initially wanted to include her jacket in her design but was ultimately unable to make it work with the rest of the ensemble because of how different it is from Aitaranian fashion. I decided that the best course of action would be to instead reference as much of a certain other character as I could in her design, which I believe turned out nicely. You can see the final product later in this post!

Traveling outfit sketches

The other outfit I needed to solidify for her is the one that she wears while traveling. This was one of the more fun ones to design because it let me experiment with a very specific style of gardening attire that I found during my research. I was able to tweak this attire (it was originally an apron) into being more like a shirt, which works far better for traveling. I also wanted to give her a cloak of some kind since I think they're fun! I researched Spanish traveling cloaks for this.

Final fancy and traveling outfits

Her dress ended up utilizing a far more saturated color palette which is important because of how many traits in this outfit are a callback to a particular character. The point being underlined by the colors is it's not quite her in some ways, but it also kind of is. This palette is almost the exact inverse of the character in question. There are a few other patterns in this outfit that invoke this character, particularly the triangles repeated on various parts of it and the ferns (which are representative of a specific god). Her sleeves are a longer version of the shirt that this other character wears and the band tied around her waist is something that royalty typically wears in-universe. The band is also meant to evoke the general idea of a similar thing some gauchos (who are similar to cowboys) wear.

Her traveling outfit utilizes a very similar color palette to her "default" outfit, meaning she's feeling a bit more at home and herself. I had a lot of fun experimenting with where to put colors in this outfit and I think the final product wound up fun while maintaining her general vibes! Her boots are a type of riding boot and are commonly used as travel wear in this universe. More importantly, she still has aspects of her design that reference the same character her fancy outfit references. You can see it in the sheer amount of triangles built into her outfit as a whole along with some of her fashion choices (ie: this character would wear a similar cloak/poncho and also a bandanna around his neck).

Final generalized character sheet

And now we circle back to her "default" design. First, I'll dig into her expression sheet! As you can see, some of the expressions are a little more extreme than others. This is because she's not quite in touch with her feelings and is fairly closed off emotionally. She's comfortable with expressing anger and generalized displeasure around other people but struggles a bit more with things like smiling comfortably.

Again, her patches are things that her sibling picked out and aren't necessarily to her taste. Her harmonica is another thing she got from her sibling before they disappeared. In previous iterations, it was the kind of harmonica that has some metal on it, but I decided it made more sense for it to be wooden given who it was that made it. It's a pretty old relic, so its paint and engravings are messed up from years of wear, making it difficult to tell what it originally had on it. Her garden shears are primarily for her job but could serve as a weapon in a pinch. They're something she got from her maternal figure who unfortunately passed away. Lastly, you can see her hood in more detail! It's made from a few different pieces of a shirt of some kind stitched together.

Overall, I think her design made some big strides during this process! My hope is to keep making more character sheets and hopefully I'll have another one up within the next month/month and a half, so stay tuned for that :)