As necessity is the mother of invention the first step to a character design is creating and identifying a need. I’ve been kicking around an idea for a while that melds my favorite parts of the zombie apocalypse, steam punk design and action manga. Taking place in the Montmartre district of paris circa 1880, it stars 2 characters; a living doll street performer who is mysteriously blaise about the surrounding hordes and a panicked american photographer trapped in the city as the legion of rotting corpses crashed over the city. To get myself in the right mindset I knocked out a sketch that I thought spoke to the entire concept.
Needs. Young male, exhausted from days of bare bones survival, still desperately clinging to a modicum of normalcy in the form of upper middle class clothes. The lineup above are my attempts to figure out his face. He starts out too rakish, seemingly confident in the face of the destruction around him. The process for him involved small variations, particularly in facial features. Working with a particular jaw line/profile then within that adjusting the shape of the nose, proportions of the mouth, and alignment of the eyes.
There needed to be some final tweaks just to solidify the concept but from there I started developing rough character sheets. These will serve as guides during the creation of the rest of the comic.
