Having completed my first ‘visual’ draft this week, I took a few days off and then began with the next step in the process, character and environment descriptions. Much like my draft this particular exercise began by going through the entire draft and recording the different types of characters that I would have to design and the sets/environments that they would be interacting in.

The idea is to basically brainstorm as much of this world as possible, by breaking down everything into pieces my brain can focus on. This whole process has been just that, breaking it all down into smaller pieces that work for me. This process may very well be completely ridiculous to someone else, but for me it works. The ideas keep flowing. Some of them are great, some of them are crap, but the essence of this is to get every onto paper. Let the idea breathe a bit. Let the idea have a form, even if it’s just something written onto a piece of paper and dies there.

Ideas are like sperm. 90% are going in the wrong direction and 10% are fighting the uphill battle to get to the egg. This process brings those 10% into contention, rather than having all 100% bottled up and waiting to explode…ok I think I might have drawn that analogy a bit far, but hopefully you get my meaning.

Each character or environment has got a page, or a series of pages dedicated for development. This is where the research for each character begins. Magazine clippings, downloaded photos, articles, whatever all get catalogued at this stage to allow for when I start designing the character’s appearance this task is relatively straight forward. I’m sure that during the drawing process more ideas will bubble to the top, but they’ll only have bubbled after I’d gotten everything out there and let it ferment for a few days.

In this, the first volume of ‘Aitus Moralis’, I currently have between 25-35 characters to design. Some obviously are more important than others, but even the simple ones will probably take a good deal of research. This trifecta of documents ‘Visual Script’, the Character Descriptions and the Environment Descriptions provide me with all the founding blocks I need to create my first readable draft (more on this in future posts) and a series of accompanying character design sheets for when the final art is being created.