Author: Micey

J. Shen or "Micey" is a Junior at Umich. She loves character design and telling stories and dabbles in making her own comics. Sketchbook Smashing is an attempt to chronicle her process in designing characters. From first concepts, hairstyle and outfit changes, or even complete shifts in design. She also hopes to map out how her own art style changes throughout the year. Her website is https://wallmouseart.weebly.com Her art Tumblr is https://wallmouse.tumblr.com

Yet another Taya update(I changed her shirt)

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I don’t know how professional character designers finalize any work, everything’s so fiddly. I thought I had taya’s design all figured out but then I placed her with my other characters and she looked too old-timey. I changed her vest to a sweater vest but that wasn’t fun to draw. I gave her this high-collared dress shirt and I like it better.

And I also decided on her color scheme too. At first I thought to make the coat mainly green with black accents but it didn’t look good with the shirt. I feel the reversed colors look much better now.

Two Other Characters

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First of all sorry for missing Monday. I was busy catching up with work.

 

The lady with the bun is another DnD backup character. She’s a college of spirits bard/social media manager.

The other unfamiliar lady is Brinnslow Harvester, the Red Priest. She’s my foray into horror art and is kinda based on Hellraiser’s Cenobites. She’s the last of her religion and has some body horror stuff going on.

The Mercenary Guild Uniform

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Hey all, here’s to acknowledging the start of a new semester. Personally, it’s been a bit hectic for me; I’ve been facing questions on what I want to do with my life and which classes I should choose or swap. But I still love what I do here. I still love working on my story.

This is my uniform design process for the antagonists of my story. They come from a guild of mercenaries from a different world based on Norse myths and they want to cause trouble for the protagonists. I wanted this futuristic viking sort of look to them. The uniforms took inspiration from the KNY uniforms in that I wanted to make them simple yet customizable.

Taya gets more makeovers

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Hey guys, sorry I missed Monday, I was on holiday without my computer and I didn’t know how to operate posting on mobile.

I’ve had such a good time converting Cyrene to DnD. It really helped me flesh her out more and receive feedback from other people, even if the feedback is on her braincell count(it’s pretty low). I decided to convert another one of my characters, Taya, to DnD too. She’s gonna be in a space campaign as an intelligence-based Lore Bard, leaving the party with low charisma stats all around.

The redesign was spurred on by my need to change her hair, which was too complicated to draw. And because her hair didn’t match her former outfit, the outfit had to be changed. I’m still keeping the queercoded dark academia aesthetic though. Her final design is still in the works. I plan on changing the vest to something more modern, to make her blend better with my other characters.

Kita’s Outfit

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So Kita’s outfit is mostly finished. I wanted to give her a tourist/traveler vibe. Her color scheme used to be red and orange but that made her look like a fast-food mascot. But then I learned that bees are attracted to the colors of purple, violet, and blue and I like this color scheme much better.