Forgot how hard I was pushing that face…
I’ve been talking about character design recently, and looking at these old drafts of Dia. Thought I’d share them to celebrate my first TWWM anniversary (May 14, 2018) rolling around. I also want to share some of the stray threads that formed Dia and became the late webcomic Ghost River, because I have a terrible habit of not writing these things down until I’ve forgotten most of them.
- Dia’s basic premise is what got me to join TWWM. She hounded me for, I think, a few months before I caved and joined so I could start working towards her.
- Problem being, there were a *lot* of hyper-specific things I knew about her (trespasser! monochrome palette! Either an invasive or native sonoran desert species with some sort of connection to water! Desert boundary! Just an absolutely wretched nature! Rangy and lanky!) and it would be preposterously difficult to find an esk like her as a newcomer.
- Or it would have been, because like two weeks after I submitted my first piece to TWWM, the ID of my dreams popped up in the nursery :’^| (thanks for enabling me, staff. Still in shock about that one.)
- There was a time when Dia’s nature feature was gonna be an introduced species (tamarisk was my first choice)… I wanted it to match her feelings of liminality as an asian-american immigrant. In retrospect, I like her having a native species too. Feels like a kindness on behalf of the earth.
- Pretty much from the start, I designed Dia with the idea of GR floating around out there. Part of what drew me to TWWM was exploring esk / human interactions, and I wanted to challenge her resentment of humans and other esk.
Note: The majority of these sketches are not canon in the TWWM game, they’re just here to show the design process.
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