Archive Hunting #1 | Character Design for visual novel games

Yesterday, when the internet connection failed us for hours on end, I found myself busying myself by looking through my harddrive and stumbling upon my so-called "Archive" - the folder I save all personal but mostly commissioned work, so I can access it whenever needed.

When you're working almost daily on new art, be it personal or professional work, sometimes you can lose perspective on just *how much* art leaves your fingertips over time, especially if it's art, that is exclusive material never seeing the light of day on traditional social media.

Now having this patreon gives me the opportunity to share at least some of those works and help give a better understanding not only on how I work, but also how I developed over the span of the last couple years: I see improvement, I see things where I think "wow, you did that so well already" and others where I even thing "I like this, maybe I should bring this back!".
And I also see just how much got drawn, and by extension, you.

For this reason I'd like to sprinkle in some of my "older" works here and there from time to time, especially when new art takes more time, and use it as a chance to reminisce about these older projects.

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To start it off, I would like to share art from one of two projects that where based on me creating reference boards for characters and sprites potentially used in the visual novel game itself.
Unfortunately I lost contact to both of these projects, so I cannot say what became of these. Still, these character designs where great projects not only for me to work on and improve my craft with, but also to take upon the challenge to make adjustable designs in my work files, that other people could understand and use. 

See, I'm convinced every artist has their preferred way of organizing their digital artworks and mine happens to be "unhinged layer galore" where I simply reign over the chaos of dozens of unnamed layers that I try and identify through thumbnails and muscle memory of logical order alone - which mostly works for me in the moment but would be a nightmare to anyone else trying to work with it (and also for me when I revisit a drawing after a while).
So whenever there's a project where I know other people get to interferre with the layered Clip Studio/Photoshop file or there's potential that I have to work with it after not having it in my conscience for a while, I have to name and organize the layers accordingly.

It certainly makes for a different workload and -flow in the beginning but it saves a huge amound of time after when it comes to variations and adjustments.

In this particular case where the characters' expressions, arm position and clothing had to be made into sprites and be adjustable through coding I had the extra challenge of drawing them in a way that would allow for this deconstruction and reassemble without changing the whole thing out and making the overlays of the seperate parts seamless.

It's super interesting to see how I achived it and also just the sheer amound of varieties that happened to be created in the process of it, considering these are only a fraction of the work that got done.

To think that none of this saw the light of day (yet) can be pretty hard sometimes, but it also shows just how much can happen behind the scenes that never comes to full fruition despite the amound of work that already went into it.