Developing a Character Design (Patreon)

I've been working on a new story inspired by the old OVA for Ah My Goddess that really charmed me recently, I thought the concept was really fun and had a lot of potential but felt like Belldandy (what a bad name!) was such a nothing character. She's so cute but doesn't really assert any sort of personality or agency and it leaves me wanting something better!

I wanted to put my own spin on the "magic wish-granting girl gets together with normal guy" but try to add a lot more of my own goofy emotional drama style of writing and maybe make it a little sexier too! I've never been great at creating fantastical characters but wanted to really strengthen those muscles here, so I have a lot of process work in comparison to how I've designed my characters prior.

For this character, the concept was already there but I wanted to look into other ways to create this character that didnt use the christian angel ideas/visual language (I drew a few angel ideas with no research earlier but those aren't included). the first 3 sketch pages were me trying to do some vague magical looking girl with the idea that should could be alien or otherworldly but just riffing off the top of my head. A lot of weird face patterns to try and copy that visual idea of Belldandy's triangles on her face, but no solid direction here yet.

I started looking into the history of goddess imagery and the earliest forms of religion viewed life as coming from a mother goddess that represents sexuality and fertility. there were some zigzag and triangle patterns that made it into the final design that came from here because I knew that whatever the final product was, I wanted her to have some sort of magical connection to love and sexuality for the story. Also looking into other mythical creatures pre-angel led me to looking into things like fairies, djinn, and early nonsecular concepts of demons that have no negative connotations to them.

I had a lot of potential paths to go down for this character's magical origins but put that on hold to think up some existing characters that i could use to inspire my look. I wanted a design that looked "iconic" and really simple, so Lum from Urusei Yatsura was the first thing that came to mind. 

I've also been really into both Byleth and Edelgard from FE3H, so I kept those in mind too. 

The big thing that gave me direction was my love for Palutena from Kid Icarus, and my main takeaway was her crown that creates a protruding shape that affects the silhouette of her head. (actually reflecting on it now I think I borrowed a lot of ideas from her lol)

I went down the Djinn/Demon route and tried some horns, I was really into the way they looked so the head and hair got locked in. Mariel and I were looking up outfit ideas and she showed me this dress/cape combo from the "heaven" themed Met Gala from a few years ago and more or less took it as it was (the triangle/diamond cutaways were original though I think?) I tried a few colors that I couldn't pick between but ended up with the muted green and dark blue/black with red accent in the end, ending up not that different from my inspirations and my previous iterations.

I still have a few characters to create for this story before it can actually take off and get fleshed out enough to draw anything for it, but I'm quite in love with my final design for her and have a lot of fun drawing sexy doodles of her already. You probably wont see her in a comic for quite a while but I thought it would be fun to talk about how she came to be!