2012 Fictional Character Portraits

Now I probably don’t need to make a post about these here on The Glass Spire since they have a whole blog of their own. (See: http://blackwednesdayisle.blogspot.ca/)

However, 2012 was the year I really worked hard on trying to visually bring to life each of the characters from my novel. Heh – see I said way back in 2014 that it wouldn’t be long before I mentioned that on this blog again :P

I'll try and drip feed the images because there are a lot of them.

So for this post and this blog I have stapled together all the fictional character illustrations I made in 2012. If you wish to learn more about each one you are welcome to read Black Wednesday Isle. As for the process of creating so many faces, well I always had an idea of what each would look like (even those described/gifted to me by contributors) and I would often go on net hunts looking for people with the ‘correct’ face shapes.

As you can see some were also based on animal studies. Drawing one per week for two years meant I ended up with a huge collection.

It’s always easier to draw with a reference. It is not always easy to find a reference photograph that matches the picture you see in your head. A few times I had to Frankenstein eyes, mouths and face shape references together to get closer to the face I had in mind.

Written cues from other writers who wanted to help with the project were great but I didn't always get it correct on the first try.

Also dealing with such a wide variety of characters and specifics made it very challenging.
For example we have six types of elf and six types of fae, two types of 'cyborgs' (ok they are not cyborgs but it's the best easy reference I can give you in a short post) An innumerable amount of what are currently being called ords who are the closest to human beings in this fantasy. And also many types of anthropomorphs, which are humans crossed with animals - which I also chose to do in three different ways.
I have half-written a species compendium to try and keep track of who should look like what depending on 'x.'
Did I mention I like a challenge? :P

Anyways all those shown in this post are ones created in 2012 - I made just about as many the following year and they are are all Letter sized illustrations.

I’ll admit it was difficult but also great fun and I will upload my 2013 creations on this subject here in a later post.