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rynlingI've been going back and forth on what the characters of An Unfound Door should look like. I was strongly influenced by The Green Knight, which is a visually breathtaking movie. I tried to move away from the stark "dark and light" costuming in order to make the character designs more colorful and broadly thematic, and also to look better in illustration.
I played the strongest social media game I possibly could in 2021, so I was really surprised by the nonexistent reception of the designs I created. The piece I posted was by far the best work I'd done at the time, yet it performed the most poorly across all social media platforms.
I worked with a super-active and super-popular artist to create more polished and professional versions of the character designs. We had a lot of fun, and the artist produced an incredible diptych in the style of an illuminated manuscript. Unfortunately, this piece performed remarkably poorly. So much so, in fact, that I'm worried that the disappointment may have contributed to why the artist stopped taking commissions and almost entirely left social media altogether.
Personally speaking, the utter failure of the designs despite excellent work, good planning, and hardcore social media hustle hit me hard. That failure destroyed me in a real and meaningful way, and I'm still trying to recover.
So I kept going back and forth on the designs, wondering what went wrong. Like, is it a race thing? Should all of the characters be white? Could I create a setting where it makes sense for everyone to be racially homogeneous? I've been thinking about the setting in terms of Ivalice, but should I set the story in real-world Germany? Do I even know anything about real-world Germany? Don't most Americans and British people still hate Germany? Is Germany still taboo? But even in Germany, why would everyone be white?
In the end, I think that, if I imagine the story looking like this...
...then that's what it should look like. Aside from their hair and clothing, I'm not really describing the characters' appearances, so there's no reason I can't use visual references from The Green Knight. And really, the odds are so overwhelmingly against any of this ever getting published that it genuinely doesn't matter. That's kind of depressing, but also liberating in its own way.
Haters gonna hate. For the time being, I'm going to imagine the characters in a way that makes sense to me. I'll keep working on the designs, and I might even draw more illustrations while I'm at it.
I played the strongest social media game I possibly could in 2021, so I was really surprised by the nonexistent reception of the designs I created. The piece I posted was by far the best work I'd done at the time, yet it performed the most poorly across all social media platforms.
I worked with a super-active and super-popular artist to create more polished and professional versions of the character designs. We had a lot of fun, and the artist produced an incredible diptych in the style of an illuminated manuscript. Unfortunately, this piece performed remarkably poorly. So much so, in fact, that I'm worried that the disappointment may have contributed to why the artist stopped taking commissions and almost entirely left social media altogether.
Personally speaking, the utter failure of the designs despite excellent work, good planning, and hardcore social media hustle hit me hard. That failure destroyed me in a real and meaningful way, and I'm still trying to recover.
So I kept going back and forth on the designs, wondering what went wrong. Like, is it a race thing? Should all of the characters be white? Could I create a setting where it makes sense for everyone to be racially homogeneous? I've been thinking about the setting in terms of Ivalice, but should I set the story in real-world Germany? Do I even know anything about real-world Germany? Don't most Americans and British people still hate Germany? Is Germany still taboo? But even in Germany, why would everyone be white?
In the end, I think that, if I imagine the story looking like this...
...then that's what it should look like. Aside from their hair and clothing, I'm not really describing the characters' appearances, so there's no reason I can't use visual references from The Green Knight. And really, the odds are so overwhelmingly against any of this ever getting published that it genuinely doesn't matter. That's kind of depressing, but also liberating in its own way.
Haters gonna hate. For the time being, I'm going to imagine the characters in a way that makes sense to me. I'll keep working on the designs, and I might even draw more illustrations while I'm at it.
