I Draw Sometimes
My dayjob is concept artist for the Sims 4. But at night I yell about D&D and draw shipping artwork nobody asked for.
jollyparaphernalia asked: Gosh, I love Chapel's character design. I found you through a character design post, and I'm curious if you have a tale about how you went through the process of designing the dumb nerd?
o no i can talk for hours about character design. i’m so sorry.
I briefly went over the design process on page 3 of this character post thing, but for a more in-depth talk… STRAP IN FOLKS IT’S GONNA BE A (long) RIDE. i’m so so sorry. i promise there will be pictures.
EDIT: OH GOD THIS POST ON MOBILE IS LITERALLY THE WORST IF YOU GUYS WANT I CAN BREAK IT IN TWO.
tldr:
Chapel and the actual story itself, Chapel Also Ran, are pretty heavily tied together in terms of development. Which kind of makes sense—he’s the titular character. I’ve actually mentioned this before, but the entire inspiration for Chapel as the character and the story came from… a 3.5 D&D campaign from college and its Pathfinder sequel.
In the first campaign (starter in 2006), there was an under-developed NPC named Michahlis Gordon. He was a quest NPC essentially—one of the three leaders of a church the party kept returning to, the leader of the clerics. He was of so little importance nobody even bothered fucking drawing him until towards the end of the campaign.
This is, technically speaking, the first picture ever drawn of him. I didn’t even draw it. It was drawn by my friend Shionyr, so all credit goes to him:
Anyway, the NPC wound up betraying the party for the sake of the greater good in the final, climactic boss fight… and then the campaign ended, and that was that. Infact you know what? Here’s his page on the campaign wiki. FUCK IT TAKE THE WHOLE WIKI. You can view a lot of my terrible old drawings on there. GOOD LUCK.
Anyway YEARRRRRS later, post-college, a group of the old players from that campaign all lived in the same area. I was gonna make a new Pathfinder campaign and we decided, you know what? Why the hell not, it’ll be a sequel.
So I planned out this big story and stuff, and since I wanted to have a lot of nods to the old campaign, decided to include him as an NPC that had a chance of getting killed off. He never died at the end of the old campaign, and considering how he fucked over the party I was interested in including him and seeing where he went. So he was introduced as an old man ranger they found in some woods who simply went by the name ‘Chapel’ (get it becuz he was a cleric).
In terms of design, he was supposed to keep his face hidden at all times to conceal his identity. I wasn’t expecting the party to find out the truth as fast as they did. SINCE WE’RE BRINGING UP EMBARRASSINGLY OLD DRAWINGS: here’s his wiki page. And fuck here’s the entire wiki. Bless all of you.
Long story short he was charged with a shitload of crimes and the party started dragging him around as a reluctant party member until the campaign broke up due to player infighting.
(he also had a dog because ranger).
After the campaign broke up I was really peeved, because I had designed all this story stuff only for it to go to waste because players weren’t getting along. So I went ‘You know what? FUCK IT, I’M GONNA MAKE MY OWN STORY. WITH BLACKJACK. AND HOOKERS.’ And since I really liked Chapel so much and he had deviated enough from its source… I decided to make him the main character.
This was the first concept piece for CAR:
ORIGINALLY ORIGINALLY the story was going to focus on an asshole outlaw having kooky adventures with his dog in a more comedic, Slayers-esque world. I went back to the idea of ‘never show Chapel’s upper face,’ only to soon realize one tiny issue:
It’s hard as shit to empathize with a character that doesn’t have eyes.
Considering the story was VERY FOCUSED on this one character, I decided to give some leeway and show at least a little bit of his eyes, but I kept the hood up.
(there’s some early saulia and luther in there too)
His outfit actually hasn’t changed that much in his designs, just gotten way more simple. I was actually going to go with that design… Until I had a friend look at the above picture and ask me if it was Talon fanart. So I went SHIET and decided SCREW THE HOOD, NO HOODS.
OKAY MAYBE SOMETIMES HOODS.
He also developed the hair-flip at this point, after I noticed how hair curls upwards on the back of the neck if you let it grow out too long. It was subtle at first.
and just got worse from there
In any case… a lot of designs with him were influenced by both a: drawing him a shitload of times, b: sticking to the mantra appealing, not attractive and c: research.
Speaking of research… Alright, I’m just gonna be kind of blunt about it. If I say anything offensive, please let me know when I say this. But Chapel did wind up going, in his design, from white to not-white.
As I was researching for the story and started following blogs like medievalPoC, I began to be exposed to the extent that fantasy stories take place in medieval Europe and star predominantly white people (there’s even a trope about it, if you’re interested in more). Since racism is present in CAR, and Chapel DOES face racism, this was made even worse by the fact that this fell into the ‘People of Hair Color’ trope… Which thanks to numerous other people telling their lives from their own points of view, I realized how fucked up it was—to have a fantasy world only gently inspired by history try to address a problem that still exists in our modern society today while at the same time perpetuate an element of that problem.
His design changed suddenly, because I sat down, looked at the characters I was making, went ‘Well, why the fuck does he have to be white?’ and changed him. I tried to steer away from ‘ye olde medieval Europe’ as a setting and instead tried to push it towards Greek and Roman culture for the dominant ‘Imperial’ culture, while looking at Mayan culture and myths for the protagonist’s own culture. Sorry if this is getting a little too deep for this discussion, but it did affect the direction of CAR, and I’d like to at least address it once instead of not even acknowledging it ever occurred… and also acknowledge this is still something I’m guilty of overall.
From that point it was just… a shitload of drawing and simplifying tbh. He lost a lot of the extra bulk he had in previous iterations so I could draw him faster, his downward-pointing nose got broken because I thought it made a more interesting silhouette, and I decided to keep the wrinkles to make him more expressive.
ANYWAY I THINK I’M RUNNING OUT OF STEAM, and you can also go way back on my tumblr and view a lot of the other iterative developments with him!
also his hair got purple. because I felt it fit his palette better.