Character Design - Ooma (The Illusionist) for Tugboat Comic

Hi everyone!

Today I want to talk a bit about my process for developing the character of Ooma Ulle - the pirate crew's resident lizard magician.

If you want to check out some of the other character design posts I've written, you can see them here!

Adeline (The Captain) | Mag (The Pilot) | Piper (The Big Guns)

Here's Ooma! She's super cute and super sweet, loves magic and doing fake accents. She's introduced in the second chapter of our comic, which you can read here.

When Hailey and I decided we wanted to have a magic user on our crew, I did some initial sketches. The character looked like this:

Obviously super different from the design we have now. So how did we get there? Hailey and I talked a lot, and agreed that our pirate crew should be a mix of human and anthropomorphic characters. We loved the idea of a lizard-like mage, so I started sketching.

I looked up some references of spitting lizards, bearded dragons, etc. We liked the idea that her neck frilled out when she was in combat. These sketches were a good jumping off point, but the design had a lot of room for improvement.

So I started drawing more! I tried to push her face design so that I could get her as expressive as possible, and I played with her body proportions.

The design on the left was the very first design where I really felt good about it. I was happy with the colors, I felt like she looked lizard-like, but still cute. But there was still something off. I wasn't satisfied with the silhouette, she felt very stiff.

The frills around her face were supposed to emulate hair, but they were really bogging down her silhouette. It wasn't very interesting. So I pushed the designs of the frills by bringing them up and closer to her head, stretched out the proportions of her chest, and made her pigeon-toed. That landed us at the middle design, which turned into the final design!

Once I felt comfortable and happy with this design, I began to do her turnaround by rotating her and drawing her at the most important angles:

And then I made a bunch more drawings of her, trying to push her expressions and her posing and get comfortable with drawing her over and over again.

And that just about does it!

Thanks for stopping by, I'm happy to answer any questions you might have!