As an aspiring character artist, it's important to be flexible with characters you create; to be ready to change them as someone else may wish for you to do so. This is more than true for characters meant for any project, even personal ones. Yet, it's always nice to have a strong connection with maybe one or two that a truly personal; characters that stick with you, often whether you like it or not. They create lives of their own within the vast infinite space of one's imagination.
I have one of those. The piece above is something I managed to find time last week to hunker down and finally finish rendering. The little alien in my lap there is a character who has been with me for many years now, yes, whether I liked it or not. In this piece he's something of a double symbol. He certainly isn't what he used to be, either, and it's interesting to look back and trace the path a character took through development.
For starters, he started off as a fan character. Now, I don't often get into fandoms enough to create fan characters, and when I stop and think about it I do believe that the fandom from whence he hailed is the only one I ever created characters for. Behold, the horror of his origins.
Welcome to the birthplace. Invader Zim. The following has a spotty reputation, in my opinion, I preferred to stay so far clear of non-canon affairs with canon characters it wasn't even funny. Curious, my first character here wasn't an invader either, as most fan characters are for the Invader Zim following. Doesn't make me any better or worse, I was a fan and that was that.
Anyway, here he was a very flat character. Very. . . flat. I liked him. . . for some reason, and kept persisting at stories surrounding him. In retrospect he wasn't very interesting at all. Really, he was a bore. I was young and stubborn, and continued to chisel away at him, but to no avail. He became the character than I couldn't draw properly unless I was stuck in the middle of a creative block, and even then getting any inspiration or motivation for him was a challenge.
I juggled his stories and development with other characters, a plethora of ideas. I even tested the waters of the non-fan universe and tried my hand at designing a human version of this alien I seemed to favourite so much. It's horrifying.
It's obvious why I put him on the back burner for a while. A long while. I left to focus on other stories, other projects, and graduating high school. He was beginning to bore me at that point, and I felt it was impossible to give ANY depth whatsoever to this character. I was set on phasing him out like other characters of mine and start new.
Even while I was finishing high school I tried really hard to conjure an interesting story for his human counterpart, and even gave him a secondary character to hopefully jumpstart his development. Still, nothing.
Aside from my creative antics, I was also ready to carve out a path for myself in interior design, and went to college for just that. Perfect timing too, because guess who returned for attention?
Oh yeah, he was back. By this time I had changed majors and decided game art was a wiser choice. I'll never regret it, actually, I've meet so many awesome people, including my boyfriend. Tangents aside, he was back, and I was more than submerged in the wonder that is original creativity. I wasn't afraid to step beyond my comfort zone as I was hardly two years before. So I took the challenge.
Still. . . nothing. Nada. Still rather flat. Sure, he was human now, he smoked (whoop de doo), and he had similar likes and dislikes as his fan character counterpart. Yet he was lacking two major things:
-Flaw and weakness
-Desires and goals
Up until this point he was as enigmatic as they get. He didn't say much, and didn't do much. I had fought with his character for four years for no apparent reason other than I had some kind of attachment that my sub-conscience refused to sever.
I tinkered away at him a little at a time, over several months, but I never let him take up my focus. I was set on just humoring my sub-conscience until this whole thing blew over and I could finally get rid of him. I started to put pieces together, and suddenly, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I wrote his entire, reshaped character over the course of a couple days while at work. . . on post-it notes.
Suddenly, he has desires, while still remaining true to my original intent on his design. Suddenly, he has weaknesses and fears, he has sorrow and joy - although the last one is rather rare. He can finally be described as a solid, comprehensible character that can be understood at a glance. FINALLY, he has volume. FINALLY, he can be related to, hated, admired and pitied.
Five long, painstaking years and I finally have a well developed character that I don't have to worry about tinkering at in vain. He was a pest up until this point, and now, I can't wait for the day that I publish the graphic novel and written novel he stars in (both of which tie into each other and are of the sci-fi genre.) He was once flippin annoying, and only made my creative blocks worse. Now, I suppose you could say he's grown to become one of my strongest muses, no matter how strange that sounds. Funny how things worked out.
And. . . I won't deny it. Every once in a while I like to visit the fandom, for nostalgia's sake. (This one's a transparency, it'll be best viewed if you click on it.)
I'm done with my soapbox now.
