Character Pics

[A. E. Lowan]

So, while we're talking about my portrait pain, what does everyone else do? How do you know what your characters look like? For years, I drew mine, and then I took to looking for pictures off the internet to match my mental images. Do you keep them in your heads, or do you like to see them watching you write? Anyone else draw?

 

[Jessquoi]

I definitely like to draw, I find it easier to describe a character after that.

 

[Ophiucha]

I usually come up with the image in my head and that's enough for me - but if I'm bored, I'll sometimes make collages of different bits of inspiration for each character. I never really find like that one model or actor who looks just right, but sometimes they'll have the right eyes or hair or body type, you know? My current project is a little more modern, so I'm taking the fashion more into consideration, which leaves a lot of room for collages of dresses and shoes and such, too. Each of my characters in this story has a very particular style based on their ethnic and economic backgrounds, among other things, so it's significant enough to warrant a bit of fun while I'm procrastinating on actually writing the story.

I'm a dreadful artist, so aside from doodles, I don't tend to have much in the way of drawings.

 

[SeverinR]

I think in three years of writing several different stories I have only found two pics that fit almost perfectly the characters of one book. I did look at the pictures while writing on occasion.
Most often I picture them in my head.

 

[skip.knox]

They stay in my head. I can't draw and I don't want to spend time trying to find photos. And photos don't help much with non-human characters. Also, by keeping them in my head, their features can stay malleable.

I'm put in mind of Mike Hammer here. Mickey Spillane never once, in all the dozens of Hammer books, describes the main character. The books are in first person, so this makes sense, but Spillane also said he did this deliberately, so that the reader could more readily picture himself as the MC. Now, I don't put Spillane forward as a high example of great literature (!), but I cite is as a viable example of the opposite extreme of visualizing your character in detail.

 

[kayd_mon]

I sketch them sometimes.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I was once riding a bus when I saw this guy who looked EXACTLY like one of my characters. Now I was 19 years old, so this was way before cell phone cameras or even digital cameras, and I didn't have a camera, so I was out of luck. I did have my small sketchbook on me, but sketching on a moving bus is hard so I would have had to ask the guy to disembark with me. As the character in question happened to be one of my antagonists who was a human trafficker what little sense of self preservation I had kicked in and I actually did NOT approach him. Had I not been alone this may have not been the case!

That same year my writing partner and I locked our keys in our car, and actually found a car thief lurking in the parking lot. So we walked up to this shady looking guy, two 19 year old girls, and asked if he was a car thief. When he asked my, we calmly explained out predicament. He looked at us for a second, shrugged, and whipped a slim jim from his sleeve and proceeded to very neatly and without damage break into our car for us.

Writers are crazy peoples.

 

[brokethepoint]

So the moral of the story is you can never find a cop when you need one, but you can find a car thief when you need one.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Pretty much. As I recall, he was also cute, if a little scruffy, but he did save the day.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I generally have a general idea of what my characters look like. Often it is based on some celebrity or on a friend of mine or someone else whose look I'm familiar with. I keep the images in my head. I don't have the talent to draw and I don't enjoy it enough to do it despite the fact.

It really does help having an idea of what the character looks like though, even if it doesn't play a big role in the story. It annoys me when I don't know how someone looks.
A while back I was trying to decide on a look for Toivo but could only come up with a vague outline - a list of attributes I wanted her to have. For a while, whenever I went out, I paid extra attention to any short, round, blonde women I met. None of them fit the bill perfectly, but eventually a more detailed image of Toivo grew out of it and now I feel I have a pretty good idea of her.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I find that, too, as a character develops sometimes my mental picture of them evolves. Drives me nuts sometimes, especially when the artwork I have for them becomes obsolete lol.

Love the name Toivo, by the way. It's strong, but lovely.

 

[Svrtnsse]

It's a Finnish name and I believe it's fairly common over there. I have something of a weakness for that language. It's got a strange rhythm and an uncompromising sound full of weird angles - it's also completely and utterly incomprehensible.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I believe it's also the closest remaining living relative to Anglo Saxon. Is this true or is my linguistic memory messing with my squishy brain again? It's either that or one of the isolates like Japanese. My writing partner is the actual linguist in this house, but she's not home right now. lol

 

[Weaver]

So, while we're talking about my portrait pain, what does everyone else do? How do you know what your characters look like? For years, I drew mine, and then I took to looking for pictures off the internet to match my mental images. Do you keep them in your heads, or do you like to see them watching you write? Anyone else draw?

I draw/paint pictures of some of my characters. One of them actually triggered a lot of backstory -- his own as well as that of the setting -- because of that. When I first drew his portrait, I thought he looked too "pretty," so I gave him a scar. Then I thought about how he would have gotten it, and all of a sudden the history of the place he's from changed.

 

[Svrtnsse]

I don't know for sure, but as I recall from language history in school (ages ago), it's not related to any of the other more common European language groups (latin, germanic). I tried checking the wikipedia page, but my basic linguistic skills aren't enough to make much sense of it.


Back on topic (sort of). -> Would you start with the name or with the look of the character?

Spontaneously I was going to say I started with the name and then built the rest around it, but the more I thought about (all of twenty seconds or so) I realized it was the other way around. Start with a vague impression of what the character looks like and then take it from there.

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Another interesting point is how much of the character's appearance comes through in the actual text. There's only so much detail you can go into about it.

 

[Chessie]

So, while we're talking about my portrait pain, what does everyone else do? How do you know what your characters look like? For years, I drew mine, and then I took to looking for pictures off the internet to match my mental images. Do you keep them in your heads, or do you like to see them watching you write? Anyone else draw?

I can't draw worth a damn so I look up pictures instead. At first, I have an impression of what my characters look like along with the rest of their essence (color of hair, skin, what they walk like, act like), but their face is obscure to me. Little details fill in as I surf the net for pictures as on occasion I tend to save some in a desktop file to refresh my mind. With time, the faces fill in and I can say ahh, nice to meet you. But it seems I need to have names for them first, before I can envision their faces.

 

[Ireth]

I once tried to draw a picture of the hero in my vampire novel, and it ended up affecting the story, believe it or not. XD I gave him six fingers on one hand by accident, but I liked the way the hand turned out so much that I couldn't bear to erase it, and just worked the extra finger into the plot. Polydactyly runs in his family on his mother's side, and it comes in handy (no pun intended!) when he has to identify his younger sister, who also has an extra finger.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Back on topic (sort of). -> Would you start with the name or with the look of the character?

Another interesting point is how much of the character's appearance comes through in the actual text. There's only so much detail you can go into about it.

For us, I think it depends on the character. Since we rp most of our character development, we tend to start with real basic stuff, like "Hot guy at a concert." (We write urban fantasy) So one of us takes on the persona of the hot guy, and the other takes on someone else (I rp most of our antagonists), next thing we're doing is making introductions, which is actually a competitive sport with us because, "So, what's his name?" is a challenge question that often sends one of both of us off to do research. Sometimes that initial name survives, sometimes not. We have 300+ named series characters on 4 continents and few duplicates (I'm still weeding). So through conversation and goofing around, the hot guy at a concert becomes a hungry vampire, but then we find out he's a rogue (not belonging to a Court) sneaking in another's territory for a tasty snack. Ah, now we have conflict! But, it's not another vampire he's competing with... he's accidentally nibbled a sorcerer and now that sorcerer's demon is ticked off... and we're off to the races!

Some characters appearances come with their names, like our FMC Winter Mulcahy. She has snow white hair, like not old-lady white but the white of sunlight on fresh snow. Her parents weren't very imaginative with her name. So, with her, the appearance and name are one and the same. She would be very different if her name was Mary.

 

[Weaver]

Some characters appearances come with their names, like our FMC Winter Mulcahy. She has snow white hair, like not old-lady white but the white of sunlight on fresh snow. Her parents weren't very imaginative with her name. So, with her, the appearance and name are one and the same. She would be very different if her name was Mary.

I've got a character in a couple of novels named Raven who has black hair. (Well, his name translates as "Raven." Close enough.) But nature-derived names are fairly common in his culture, and black or dark brown hair is the norm, so it's not as if he got that name because of his appearance.

Anybody else see the movie Coraline? Remember Wybie's comment about how 'ordinary names make other people have ordinary expectations' of a person? I don't think this is anywhere near an absolute, but I do think that people with 'stand-out' names are likely to adapt to that, and people with 'plain' names have to work harder to be noticed. That affects how they see themselves and how they interact with other people.

 

[Ireth]

I've got a character in a couple of novels named Raven who has black hair. (Well, his name translates as "Raven." Close enough.)

I have a Fae prince just like that. XD Also briefly had a RP character who was leucistic, and her parents named her Eira (Welsh for "snow") because of her white hair. I'm thinking of bringing her into another project of mine; we'll see how it works out.