Early Gale Ponytail / Mommy Zelle Concept Art (Patreon)

In its early stages, the West Patch was going to have more conventional human designs with a bit of magical contamination mixed in. That's ultimately where we landed, but we pushed things with unnatural skin colors (pink for Gale, lavender for Orpho, beige for Pogey, etc), but before we stepped back and pushed them, Gale looked younger and more emotionally flexible versus her current, more mature demeanor. We decided to change her for a few reasons. First, her name-sake's ponytail wasn't very distinct in these early designs. She was also coming across too young for what we were going for. It was important to us that all the kids, while still immature, still appear old enough to know right from wrong as that's one of the main themes of our satire angle. We also wanted stronger silhouette variety, and she looked too similar to Cupper Dup with the cone dress and slim build. Most of the children in the West Patch are fairly true to our original sketches, but since Gale had more of a shift as we developed them, we thought we'd share!

Mommy Zelle had more of a transformation - as did all the adults of All House, which we'll cover in a later little post - but we thought we'd toss up some early exploration sketches of her while we were at it!

Look forward to another production update later this week, as well as another YouTube video on how we approach writing characters!

See you next time!