Designing a Hyena, the Frankenstein Method

Almost exactly a month ago, I was approached by Luminblaze with a task so daunting that even the most valiant hero's heart would tremble at the mention, a design commission. I haven't taken on many in the past, often trying to navigate how much work should be put to them and how much time can be tricky. Finding the balance between simply handing the commissioner a design off a prompt, versus going as intensive as possible to squeeze out every kink on the design to give as much design power to the commissioner can be a hard line to strike.

Thankfully, Lumin made it simple, he was ready for us to go as intensive as possible! Thus began what has probably been the most intensive design process I've ever participated in! I have (lamely) dubbed it, my Frankenstein method.

With most of my designs, I like to start with the head. The head and the overall body shape often are one of the easiest ways to get a firm grip on the characters personality. While it's better for a full drawing to get the line of action in and work the body from the beginning, at least for how I design characters, heads offer a low investment way to get a LOT of ideas on paper quickly without wasting time drawing full bodies.

As becomes a recurring theme, after I idea dump as many possibilities as I can come up within a set time-span, I would hand the designs off to Lumin, get his feedback, and use that to merge the traits he liked the most into what he gravitated most towards, patching them together as we slowly tried to put on paper the kind of look that he felt strongest for, until finally arriving at-

the final head! just look at that charming smile!

With the head locked down, it was onto bodies. Lumin had seemed to lean more towards a more "standard" bodyset so I was able to focus more on slight differences between each.  While each of these bodies were pretty close to one another, being able to have them side by side shows quite quickly what a massive difference a couple of changes can make.

as always, back to Lumin the bodies went, and we iterated again! before finally arriving at

this handsome fellow! big arms for hugging, and finally more than a simple head! From this point, it was a simple matter of refining the body, trying to figure out what elements could be used to sell the characters personality more, and whats more important to a good hyena doggo then his tail?

And so I began drawing a LOT of tails, and, as always, they were handed to lumin, we iterated, until finally finding something that fit exactly what he was looking for. as with the body previously, it's pretty easy to see how many massively different tails you can get from something as simple as a few small changes

After tails were nailed down, the next step was making sure that the yeen had a mane that would make all over the other borkers jealous.  In this step, we got lucky and no iterations were needed! #4 immediately clicked with lumin, and we were able to jump to the next step.

Lines were added, the boy finally got an arm! At this point, I stopped again to check with Lumin simply to make sure everything was still looking good for him. Though it may seem unnecessary (it's just adding a hand!) sometimes a small update could axe things that the commissioner really liked, staying on the same page is important! A few extra lines could make the character look far fluffier, a few missed lines could lose the muscle definition that the commissioner gravitated towards, or make the mane sharper than they wanted. While this might not be important in a regular commission (small variance happens!) In a design commission you want everything right from the get go so that future pictures involving that character have a better chance to capture what you want!

And so began the next step in the process, and one of the most difficult, comparable to even figuring out the design in the first place, color

When doing colors, I like to create a few "unique" variants, ones that have markings different from each other as much as I can manage. This is obviously smart for the pure sake of getting unique designs from one another to offer to the commissioner, but it makes my true secret tactic in designs become all the more powerful.

The hue slider in adjustments, and the color balance option in photoshop and layer styles can give you a VAST amount of new options simply by tweaking them, and adding a few lines when necessary to balance the colors of the design out again. (sometimes this means changing some colors so the whole design blends, sometimes it means tweaking saturation or changing out some colors, but all in all, far less intensive than recoloring the whole character!)

This has a few awesome benefits.
1- You can get a bunch of variants FAST and with far less effort than trying to recolor each piece by piece
2- colors often can maintain their unity fairly well thanks to color theory black magic
3- Often you can find color combos you wouldn't have thought of in the first place! 

as always, we began to iterate

and iterate

AND ITERATE

Finally, a winner was chosen! once again, it seemed the lucky number was good ol four!

But just because the design was finished, didn't mean the commission was done.

like all good boi's he needed some armor, what followed was a series of the same process as before, creating wips, checking with the commissioner, I won't go into detail too much here as the armor colors were simple variants, and it's just a repeat of what I said before, but-

Suffice to say, we iterated ALOT and made sure to get all those small details that sell a character down to their specifics! Finally, the commission was slain! or at least, it had one killing blow left!

A quick sheet to bring all of the details together in as simple and as easy to read method as I could! and with that, the boy was done, a rather dashing fellow too!