#the original skin is sayara

[sayaratyriea]

What's the physical appearance of all your main characters? I like to have a vague image of characters in my head and they all seem really interesting.

I’ve actually drawn them all a few different times, if you take a plunge into my blog’s /tagged/taz-draws-things archive. Just be warned that there’s a lot of weird crap in there too. But since I’ve drawn them, and actually contemplated making a comic with them before, they have pretty well-established designs for the most part!  

-Sayara is fair-skinned, with dark blonde curly hair and greyish-blue eyes. She’s about 5 feet tall for most of the series. As an adult, she still only grows to around 5′2″. So she’s decently short. She’s built stocky, one of those people who accumulates muscle mass easily and doesn’t look quite right without a certain level of physical fitness. She straddles the line between hourglass figure and brick wall, she’s got pudge but also a lot of muscle. If she doesn’t do her hair right then she risks looking like a Lego minifigure because of her somewhat squared-off face shape. She’s pretty when she puts in the effort, but she usually can’t be bothered. She likes to wear her hair in two big fat braids. She has butterfly-morph wings with a whole lot of colors in them, but the dominant color is blue. 

-Hope is a platinum blonde, one of those people who’d be accused of dying her hair IRL. Her hair’s also pretty straight, though it would wave if she let it grow past her shoulders. She’s taller and slimmer than Sayara, around average height with a more bottom-heavy build. She’s a pretty average white girl, not gonna lie. Also grey-blue eyes, but with a touch more green to them than Sayara’s. She also has more olive undertones to her skin than Sayara, who’s pretty rosy. Hope has mainly-teal butterfly-morph wings. 

-Violet and Lavender are identical twins, the only visible difference between them is how they part their hair. They’re fantasy East Asian, so slightly tilted monolid eyes and flatter noses, but they both have somewhat long faces and very sharp cheekbones. They have purple eyes, Violet’s are a bit darker than Lavender’s. Their hair is black and very long, reaching to around their waists in book 1 and getting longer as they grow up--in book 3 it’s past their hips. Lavender almost always keeps hers in a bun, but Violet can’t be bothered to braid or style it half the time and lets it fly loose and get everywhere. Both girls are skinny and very tall, measuring at 5′11″ when they’re done growing. Lavender looks healthy, Violet looks like she needs to stop skipping meals. Vi wears a ton of silver jewelry all the time. She also has a belly button piercing that she thinks her mom doesn’t know about. Since they’re Irkatzi, the twins have purple blood, which means they look like they’re drowning sometimes. The magic purple underneath skin with any pigmentation at all creates this ashy, washed-out look that’s very alien but winds up suiting them nicely. Violet is canonically the most attractive fairy, I firmly believe that on Earth she could be a supermodel. She’s absolutely gorgeous. Lavender is too, but there’s something very striking and sharp about how Violet presents herself that Lavender replaces with softness. I have a thing for girls who could beat me up. They both have dragonfly-morph wings. Violet’s are purple and black, Lavender’s are pale pastel purple with slight blue and seafoam-green accents. 

-Aelia’s also Irkatzi, and thus also purple-blooded with purple monolid eyes. Her eye coloring is more intense than Violet’s and has more red to it. She also has yellow streaks in her eyes, which is neat. It doesn’t happen often with the Irkatzi because usually yellow eye coloring merges with the purple and produces a dull brown if it’s present. Elli has short hair, since she hasn’t had her seventh evolution yet and the Irkatzi traditionally don’t (and can’t) grow their hair much longer than chin-length before the bulk of their magic comes in. She’s bit darker-skinned than the twins, but that doesn’t say much because the effect of the purple blood still makes her pretty pale-looking. She’s built tall and slim like her sisters, but she’s also pretty buff. She looks like she has bigger boobs than the twins but they’re actually just pecs. None of the Ravenharts are very well-endowed. She likes to wear tight-fitting clothing to show off how much muscle she’s got... it doesn’t always work, because she’s still a Ravenhart, and her frame just isn’t capable of building up that much visible beef. She’s pretty upset about it. Aelia’s wings are dragonfly-morph and mostly orchid purple. 

-Amalie’s physical appearance is in a state of flux at the moment because I keep redesigning her, but she’s some shade of brown. Brown eyes, brown wavy hair, brown skin. She was originally based off of an IRL friend who’s simply rather tan, but I feel like next to all the pale-ass Tyrieas and Ravenharts I should have at least one major character who’s not that? Amalie’s around average height and average weight, nothing really remarkable. Her interesting feature is her wings, which are special. I don’t want to spoil what’s weird about them right now, but they don’t look or function like normal fairy wings. Amalie usually wears cloaks and other long flowy dramatic articles of clothing, so her physical features are ~mysterious~. 

As for the villains... 

-Kyrina’s tan, with light caramelly brown hair and very intense green eyes. She’s got mixed parents, her mom was very pale and her dad was medium brown, so the result is that she’s somewhere right in the middle there. She’s around the same height and build as Sayara, but she’s more pudgy than muscular. She’s got that nice Renaissance painting fat, or at least as much of it as fairies are physically capable of accumulating. She has a very nice-looking nose, and she styles her hair in very fancy ways. When she grows up, she matures into a really nice hourglass figure, but as a teenager she’s just not there yet. She’s definitely never gonna be skinny. She has the largest wingspan of the main teenage cast, even though she’s one of the shortest. Her wings are butterfly-morph and bright red.

-Dusk is another tall-and-scrawny, I seem to have a thing for that body shape. She’s fair-skinned but tanner and more olive than the Tyrieas, with dark hair and very pale silver eyes. She’s around the same height as Aelia. She dresses very nicely, almost always wearing the same dark red suit jacket, which is one of her favorite items of clothing. She and her precious jacket are nearly inseparable. She also wears a lot of makeup. Her signature look is casual red lipstick. She’s tall and wears high heels a lot, so she can fool people into thinking she’s a lot older than she is when she wants to. As a 14-year-old this is unsettling, but she grows into it over the series. In book 1 she keeps her hair short, but she grows it out later. She has pointy triangle bangs. One of my IRL friends nicknamed her “Red Satsuki” (after the character from Kill la Kill), so yeah.

None of these necessarily have to be written in stone, of course--I have my detailed descriptions, and my own canon art, but I also like hearing other people’s interpretations! Ultimately most aspects of the characters’ appearances aren’t that important, it’s more about the stuff they choose for themselves.