Clover Arizona

2022-11-29

@phenokage

Back when I worked in retail, I split an order of burgers with a then-coworker's then-boyfriend who was also a furry artist and budding fursuit maker, and we hashed out a throwaway character design for a homemade suit based on the “Call Apogee, Say Aardwolf” easter egg from Wolfenstein 3D. Unfortunately, like most of my throwaway characters, I fell in love with this one.

Technically Apogee does have a ref sheet — MoreFurLess required I submit one when I was getting myself into their queue — but whenever possible I link artists to his Trello to paint a better picture of the character's whole vibe. His sketchbook, meant to resemble the notebook margin doodles of a skater fresh out of college, is the collaborative work of 40 different artists spanning from 2015-2020 (with more to come, eventually, hopefully), and I encourage artists at conventions to leaf through it as they're adding a page of their own.

Two minor shifts happened during Apogee's construction. The initial design we drafted over burgers put him in a maple leaf shirt with the word “CANADA” partly-obscured by his jacket. As I continued getting art of him, I threw a red “Home Taping Is Killing Music” shirt that I found from a Google image search into my reference folder; this was meant as an example of the sort of thing the character would wear, but it quickly became The Thing He Wears. Our key art also didn't specify a hair color, and most artists read it as dark brown or black; this continued until I had to give MFL a concrete answer for the mane they were building, which was when I split the middle on a warm dark grey.

Most of my characters don't have ref sheets; when I'm commissioning art, I just send a couple of drawings to provide some approximation of what the character looks like, and a swatch for the artist to eyedrop colors from. Sometimes an artist will deviate from that approximation, or add their own little flourishes or fill in the blanks on missing details, and then I'll wind up adding it to the handful of examples I send to the next artist. So a lot of my characters go through this unintentional, group-activity iterative design process.

As an example, my jackal character, Jackal, started as a stream-sketch commission by @floe. While I was feeling the character out, I sent that drawing to @wasabitea_ and asked them to draw a plantigrade version of the same character. Later on, I sent just the plantigrade drawing to @_pocketss and asked them to draw a digitigrade version. That resulted in the character's design as it is presently.