Deadly Sins - main party

(First remember - you could always read first issue of this book for free here... And also buy the entire book, if you want... You know...)

Now, let's talk some character designs! Thanks to development process of the book, I had an entire month - or maybe two - for designing the entire cast of our characters. Still, when I started making actual pages later, a lot of little things shifted here and there, as usual. But to this day I'm very glad that I had this time for proper planning and even some dubious style decisions (more on this later!) - AND WAS PAID FOR EVERYTHING. Basically a month or two worth of decent salary for the things that are quite often conceived as a free part of job.

*dozing off thinking about those two sweet years of stable income and financial guarantees and safety*

Ahem--

*getting back to biz*

Basically, I'm gonna make two big posts about designing 80% of 7 Sins characters, give some fun examples for my thinking process or weird references we used in the book etc.

Here we go!

Jericho March, for example, was pretty easy to nail down once I saw a picture of younger Bass Reeves:

THE STACHE! UGH! <3 <3 <3

(No fucking wonder I'm drawing a comic where the main character in as old Asian gentlemen with even bigger moustache)

Actual Cannibal Hogg Smyth:

Dapper Dudley, stage performer with makeup burned into his skin:

If you follow me on the Sequentialist level and have already seen my old (and unpublished) Weird West comic, you may remember this character:

Yes, I rehashed his costume! because I'm still bitter about some work I did and some references I found for those unpublished Western stories. Specifically, Dapper's snake skin belt is probably my favorite costume detail from DEADWOOD:

Also, Dapper himself is basically a "flamboyant" Ted Levine:

I think having Father Antonio sweating more and more profusely gradually throughout all 6 issues was the best and most consistent part of planning on my side. I might forget if a character has only one arm in my own book. But goddamn I remember about sweat!

God I hate my first sketches for Irish Claire. AND ALL IT TOOK TO FIX HER was making her face round! (But as the book went on, I kinda lost the great character and texture of her hair. Many things began looking more authentic or realistic in those designs but ended up drifting away from them).

After figuring out basic designs for most of the characters, I then filled a ton of MangaStudio sheets drawing just their faces, tweaking things, proportions or accessories around and then composing best little drawing into separate sheets. (Note - Claire's face is finally round here):

CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!