Concept History: Caldwell (Patreon)

It's time... for Concept Art Corner! Actually, nevermind. We're not calling it that.

For both myself and for readers, I'll be collecting the history of character designs throughout the lengthy runtime of Spellcross and collating them into informational posts like these. Of course, the only place to begin such an endeavor is with our main character, Caldwell. The story of his design is the story of Spellcross itself, in many ways.

This is the first image I ever drew of Cal, back in early 2009. At first, this was just another character design I made for fun, with no future plans. The vague story concept was that this kid was a weenie who was bad at fighting, so his rich and well-to-do parents had their family ice dragon fly him to a glacier where he could train his endurance. I remember looking up names associated with the cold, and finding Caldwell which is a surname of Old English origin meaning "cold well". And thus Caldwell was born!

I was very active on DeviantArt back around those times, and had been participating in Original Character Tournaments semi-frequently. I've described them on some other posts and on Twitter, but the brief overview is that they're collaborative art and writing competitions where you illustrate a comic battle pitting your character against someone else's. An upcoming OCT called "Artists At the Ready" was forming at the time, and the gimmick was that you'd be drawing your artist representation fighting using three original characters to fight for you. I didn't have a lot of characters at the time, so I was scrabbling for ideas to flesh out. Then I remembered that drawing I made of the kid on the glacier, and decided to expand it.

It's extremely funny to me to read the silly info I filled in here. Especially "Favorite Food: Rice". Do you just eat plain white rice, overly smug proto-Caldwell? This was before I had solidified Caldwell's personality for the comic, so at the time he was an overconfident loser who fell apart under the slightest pressure. He fought by releasing fire or ice from his staff, by throwing potions,  and commanding a team of automatons. My tournament run was fairly short lived as the entire tournament crumbled several rounds in. This was extremely common back then as, with hindsight, all of the people running these things were neurotic and depressed/anxious/mentally ill artists. So were the people participating in them, myself included.

AATR and it's follow-up redo would consume most of my time for the next year until midway into 2010 when I first had the inkling that I'd like to start working on my own original comic. With nothing else on my plate at the time, I started to produce the first version of Spellcross. It was, regrettably, a spectacular failure. It took me 7 months to produce 20 pages, which skipped the entire beginning of the story and started mid Dungeon Exam. Readers were bored and confused, and I was frustrated with my lack of ability and control over the plot and pacing. I got a few pages into a second chapter before I gave up and scrapped the endeavor.

I'd go back to participating in OCTs for a while after this. But Spellcross remained at the forefront of my thoughts. It had always been there, ever since the first time I had an idea for it in 2005-2006. Fun fact, the very first concept for Spellcross never left the Colosseo and was a straight up tournament arc comic. I wonder if I wouldn't have been better off writing that smaller scale comic instead...

Sometime in early 2011 I told myself that enough was enough, I had to start seriously thinking about how I was going to get Spellcross off the ground. I was constantly wibbling about whether my art was good enough, if I could write and produce a comic in a reasonable timeframe, if anyone was going to read it. Over the course of 2011 I would continue to wibble as I drew and refined the main cast, creating illustrations like these. 

It wouldn't be until summer of 2012 that the current version of Spellcross would properly begin. Caldwell's design was well solidified by this point and wouldn't see any major changes for several years. I closed the unnecessary shoulder holes and replaced them with belts, and shortened his long coat tails. I was happy with this look since it accentuated all the gear and pouches he carried. 

Over time I became irritated with drawing certain aspects of this design, however. I loved his high collar, but it somehow connected to a hood dangling off the back, and a scarf nebulously emerges from somewhere under that hood. It was hard to draw his sleeves, too. I didn't want to suddenly just start drawing him differently, so I began thinking seriously about how and when I might change Caldwell's design.

My irritation and lack of self-confidence peaked. After Chapter 13 was posted in August 2014, I decided to take a break for a few months and try to study and improve my art. In typical fashion my efforts were scatterbrained and dubiously successful, but I did produce practice sketches such as these in the interim.

I wanted to represent the characters in better detail, so Caldwell's previously banana-like hair was tousled out into more individual strands. I think I was barking up the wrong tree here, considering how I went back to the more natural feeling banana hair almost immediately, but leaning slightly more towards realism was a reasonable mistake for me to make at the time. The backwoods town I lived in didn't have any art teachers, and there weren't any reasonably close colleges (community or otherwise) that I could join to try and get real instruction. So all I had to try and improve was online tutorials and trying to copy manga I liked. If I could go back I would grab myself by the shoulders and shout "Work on your fundamentals, you fool!"

In 2015, Spellcross resumed with a sparkly new artstyle. In rare fashion, I made ref sheets of the main cast of the Garden dungeon.

This design for Caldwell would last for the next several years worth of updates. I'm still happy with the look, it's more sleek and much easier to draw than the previous. The sleeves once again ended up being an issue, as the gear designs on the cuffs were an immense pain in the ass to draw from multiple angles. As such they were not continued into the next design.

Around 2020, the story was again coming to an important crossroads as Part 1 began to wrap up. Thanks to Covid my life was about to be thrown into incredible turmoil, so the actual moment was still years away, but nonetheless I was doing sketches like these trying to puzzle out a new look. 

Once things settled down and I was able to resume Spellcross again regularly at the start of 2023, I created a ref with the current design.

It's always so strange for me to look backwards and see everything that's gone into Spellcross. It doesn't feel like any time has passed, but it also feels like a lifetime ago that the project began. So many times I came so close to ending it permanently and doing something else. But what keeps me going is every time a new reader finds the comic and has a positive experience with it. I can't ask for anything more than for my work to evoke emotions in someone else. Thank you, readers. From the bottom of my heart.

Many more of these to come as I continue to delve into my archives.