Creating Santiago and boarding the struggle bus
Hey. Remember Finn Westur from the beginning of this rant? He's back again to serve as the base for building up Santiago. I took heavy inspiration from his strict, rule-following personality and kept that in mind while redesigning him. Which...oh boy. This took a while.
Long story short, this was a month or two before Artfight 2022. I was freaking out and vividly remember doing all-nighters to try and find ideas for the outfit. I wanted them to look really nice since they were the main character.
Below this text you can see a picture of the first draft I had of the design. It...was definitely a concept. My biggest struggle here was figuring out how much color I should add. I wanted to make the character look goth, yet it would be a crying shame if I didn't pay omage to the beautiful and colorful aesthetic of Mexico.
As a bonus, here's a color palette I almost used as a base. Yes, this was after I realized I was asexual. (Seriously though, what was I thinking?)
Needless to say, I tried again. This time, with more colors and flare to the outfit. I also tried to balance out the detail instead of scrunch it up in one place, a flaw I noticed in some HSS designs. There's some improvement here, though I'm of course not done with the redesigns.
Last one before the finish line! I was super close to going with this one. The only reason why I didn't is because the jacket kept bugging me to draw, and I noticed all of the details on the outfit were so small yet didn't add anything substantial to the symbolism / silhouette, and could be tedious to recreate. Besides, I knew I already wanted a character with a flower concept in the same story; there shouldn't be a need to have the same motif on another character.
For the final redesign before I lost my mind, I decided to have only two flowers on the outfit and have all the colors be less murky (for lack of a better vocabulary). It's a much less 'in your face' outfit, and 100x better.
Here's a full timeline of their outfit evolution.
If you were paying attention to this section, you might have caught something. On the drafted color palette, the name it went under wasn't Santiago or any variation of it. Rather, it was...Kristopher? Weird as it sounds, that was their beta name. I can't pinpoint why I chose it at first, but I turned it into Santiago's second first name as a bonus easter egg.
Making Hazel without reinventing the wheel
This is going to be a short section because, thankfully, Hazel was super duper easy to make. Below is a picture of what Mira Cortrell's design was, as well as an old concept for her color palette I found on my coolors profile.
Other than the oobvious color palette, there are only few things I changed, one of them being the inclusion of the dragonfly collar. It's a small detail, though it's very important since it shows what patron bug she has.
Something else is the hair. Being honest, I had no clue on what the story behind it would be. All I knew is that I wanted Hazel to have one eye and have it be part of a subplot and a way to track the friendship between her and Santiago. The closer they were, the more Santiago would know about her story.
I did one last beta design and tweaked it a little to finish it off.
Now to explain the change in name. Hazel was chosen as a reference to 'witch hazel' because well, she's a witch, and witch hazel is a herb 'used to heal broken hearts.' Pretty corny but neat symbolism if I do say so myself.
Creating Emelda in a rush of time
Something I didn't mention in the other two characters' creation sections is the time period I designed the main trio. I HAD LESS THAN A MONTH TO DO THIS. Why? Because of something called Artfight. To sum it up, the event comes around every July, and I needed official designs for my characters if I wanted to participate. Santiago's outfit creation alone took place in late May; Emelda's design phase was the last week of June.
Ironically, though, her design was the easiest to make. Part of that was due to the fact that I had given up and was rushing to get something out. Yet at the same time, I already had a few ideas how Emelda would fit into the plot and what she would symbolize. Therefore, what she represented was an easy blueprint for inspiration and motifs found throughout.
As you can see, the version on the left was the beta test. For some reason it reminded me too much of Dolores from Encanto, and gave off a 'piratey' vibe that didn't belong in Imago Daze. When I drew Emelda's final design, I hated it at first. But it turned out that it wasn't bad as it seemed, since other people seemed to think it was neat. Lesson learned: never trust self-doubt.
