marce9ine

[marce9ine]

Henry of Skalitz. I need more practice.

[marce9ine]

[marce9ine]

i know tom nook hates to see them coming

[marce9ine]

Super into papas freezeria lately...Gremmie's my favourite :"")

[marce9ine]

tragic yuri.

[marce9ine]

always and forever 🌸

[marce9ine]

Hi cap!!

[marce9ine]

:)

[marce9ine]

An animation doodle from maybe.. 2 years ago(?) that I found in one of my folders. A little scene of Kim holding back laughter. The original has sound, I should adjust and clean it up if time permits.

[marce9ine]

Hand painting a Harry Dubois horrific necktie today!

[marce9ine]

IM LATE FOR OCTOBER 11TH AGGHHHHH

[marce9ine]

he's still bad with the flashlight

[marce9ine]

[marce9ine]

Sunrise, Parabellum ☀️

[marce9ine]

I wanted to vent, but also ask an honest question. Since I was a teenager, I always wanted to work on character design. And one thing that always caught my attention was how I always preferred male character designs over female ones. My first thought was that I was always more into androgynous fashion and more masculine styles. But time passed and I came to the conclusion that it wasn't just that, and it seems that male characters can always be different things: fat, thin, handsome, ugly, short, tall, young, old, etc. and female characters, for the most part, fall into two categories: cute or sexy. I wanted some tips on how I can make female characters with more interesting designs, without having to fall into those two categories. I love your work and you managed to make someone else like the three musketeers <3<3

Hello ! That's definitely a good question and something I think about a lot. The bias towards beauty is very strong in character design and it takes a conscious effort to diversify output in that regard.

That sort of advice might be a bit obvious, but one habit I picked up from the director on my first feature film gig was to actually "cast" characters. Without reference, we tend to go for the kind of symmetrical face and "average" features mostly out of stylistic habit. I like to look at character actors with distinct faces (I like this pinterest page that has a lot of faces in one place) but also just acquaintances or pictures of random crowds.

When designing a character, at first I'm always building a big reference board trying to decide what Type of Guy (gender neutral) I'm going for, trying use photos rather than other people's art, because I want to rely on automatics and graphic symbols as little as possible. Whether I'm designing a man or a woman or other, I use references of fashion styles and people across the board in terms of gender so I keep the scope open. Sometimes a character ref board for me will be a picture of one of my aunts next to a bunch of screenshots of Columbo. In my experience, a lot of the times, it's mostly about going with styles and archetypes the same way you would for a male character, and switching it up somewhere along the way by looking at real women in your life and beyond as a grounding mechanism. Sometimes that will mean changing almost nothing, because the borders between genders and how you characterize them is blurry and fluid, and sometimes it will mean using features that are uniquely tied to some sort of female experience.

I enjoy realism and I think getting more proficient at it did help me diversify my designs (I find that more difficult to do with more minimalistic styles). Still, I am mostly a fantasy artist and in my case that comes with some amount of stylization and idealization of shapes and looks. I'm far from perfect in my biases and I'm not going out of my way to draw "ugly" characters because that doesn't mean much to me ; I try to draw inspiration from the faces of every day people and I associate it with my love for fashion. It's also worth noting the work I post here for fun is a lot more hash tag aesthetic than the stuff I do professionally where diversity is much more important.

I don't know if any of that is relevant but that's definitely an interesting topic ! I'd love to know others' perspective and tips on the matter.

[marce9ine]

played life is strange 2 a week ago and had such a normal time

[marce9ine]

Larry from the hit game Sally Face