SotD Concepts - Part 1: Sunday Blackburne (Patreon)

I haven't talked about this yet on Patreon, so if you haven't heard yet: I'm building up concepts for a new comic that I'll be doing once Supernormal Step is finished called Speak of the Devil! I've posted concept art for it elsewhere (Like at speakdevil.com ), but I wanted to talk about it in more detail for you all here as a bonus!

For this part, I'm going to go over the main character Sunday Blackburne, and my thought process while designing her. Let's get started!

Initial Concept: I wasn't sure what the story would be yet when I drew this one. My first thought was that I wanted to do a story in a futuristic/fantasy city with a character that was kind of a Knight for hire. Like a detective story about a star wars character. That's all I had really, the design turned out kind of boring for me, and really didn't feel like it had my personality in it. So I knew immediately there would need to be changes to the very core of my idea.

Getting the Ball Rolling: The changes I made were to lean into the detective and fantasy sides a bit more. So now the main character was more of an investigator for hire and less a knight (still had an energy sword though? I dunno...) and had some horns and color around her eyes to make her a little less human. This is also when I came up with the title Speak of the Devil!

The first image in the upper left corner I did all with painted shapes, because I really felt I needed to work on the blocks of color that make up the character. Those are really important to help your character stand out. I think I succeeded for the most part.

The other two images were done afterward to get a cleaner look at the character, and to get her personality down more. She was less stoic, more rough around the edges, a lot more like a protagonist I would want to write about.

Something still was off to me though. The design wasn't quite where I wanted it yet. maybe all the sci-fi aspects aren't my thing...

Add a Dash of Punk: Since the aesthetic just wasn't working for me before I decided to get scrappy. I took the overall shapes of the character I had established, but added a bit of punk flavor to it. I tried to make her a character with a fashion sense I would enjoy drawing. On top of that, I made her coat more like one you would see a Noir detective wear, to really sell that idea more.

Also in previous designs I said to myself "A tail would just be going too far, no way." But as you can see here, I went "Wait why not?" and I liked the result.

I felt like I almost had it. She wasn't quite there yet, but I felt more like I was getting into my comfort zone. From here on I knew it would at least be a lot more fun for me.

So Close: I actually thought I was done when I drew that first design in the upper left of the image above. So I began developing the world and the story! Once I had some ideas of what kinds of things Sunday would be doing, I designed some wardrobe changes for her. A lot of work went into researching clothes and trying to figure out what would fit her, and ways to make her design a bit cooler.

This is where the struggle began. The character fit the story just fine, but I struggled with fitting her into the situations I wanted to write about. The design was good, but something was still wrong, it took me a while to figure that out too.

I still like this design mostly, but she clearly needed some things tweaked to get her both meshed with the story better and to look a bit more striking. I just knew that I could push her design over the top if I worked on it more.

Few Steps Forward, Few Steps Back: I still wasn't quite sure what the problem was, but I knew I had to change something. This design was just kind of a stepping stone. I tried to draw Sunday without looking at the previous design, and just changed some bits and pieces from my memory.

The result is... okay? It's not great, I liked the previous one better. The upside is that It helped me figure out what I liked about the previous design and what I didn't like.

I immediately knew this wasn't what I wanted. It was important to experiment a bit though.

Everything I Like, and Some Changes: I went into this one to start with as just a face study to figure things out while looking at photos of real people. This resulted in trying out a new hairstyle for Sunday. That sparked something.

I began working on an all new design for her incorporating the new haircut and all the things I liked about previous designs, while tweaking a few things that didn't quite excite me.

I really like how this one looks, but who knows? I might find more things I need to tweak in the future. I've yet to try and design a wardrobe for this version, so we'll see!

-

I hope you enjoyed looking at the evolution of Sunday Blackburne!

Is this something you'd like to see more of? I have a bunch of design work to do with Speak of the Devil, and other characters I'm developing. Let me know if you'd like to hear my thoughts on them!