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Description
Yeah I know this isn't the big character at the literal center of the last drawing I posted but I'll get there eventually, trust me XD This is my OC Dawn Hewlett, and she's going to be the main character of the novel I'm working on. Since that project will be the center point of the wider narrative of the Drake Hero universe, I think it's a good place to start. I can use this story to branch both forwards and backwards comfortably as I worldbuild.

Dawn came to me in a dream, a running theme you'll find as I show off my world. I suffer from chronic night terrors, and while most of them are just god awful eldritch madness and screaming monsters, sometimes they're more coherent and my brain tickles its storytelling muscles in my sleep. I figure hell, if I'm stuck having these awful experiences every night, I might as well use the material to make something out of it. It all comes from the same meatball in my skull anyways lol.

Dawn was one of those instances, and her story was one of the clearest nightmares I've had to date. The basic premise is this poor girl who died in a car crash on her way to a party, and her soul is recruited against her will to become the new grim reaper. She has to come to terms not just with her own death, but being assigned to escort other people in various states of acceptance to the veil as well. Along the way, she meets a ragtag band of skeletal specters like herself who had been recruited just like her in previous centuries. All the while, back in the mortal realm, her still living friends have to help her unravel a conspiracy plaguing their fictional hometown of Eagle Crest (known as Suwarrow to the Natives). It's still a work in progress, and obviously I don't want to give away too much since I intend to publish this as a book some day. But I'll be sharing more denizens of Eagle Crest as I write. It helps me visualize a scene when I can match a design to the character speaking.

Design notes, I did my best to pull the details straight from my nightmare. Dawn is an average girl in her human form, but her reaper form is more unique. She (and the other reapers too) was a chalk white specter with only a ghostly off-white outline of what was her flesh in life. I couldn't really get it to come across in the art, but in the dream it was made vividly clear that her bones have strands of calcified muscle attached (the medical term would be Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva if you want a visual reference, but that's a mouthful). Personally I like to draw my skeletons with tendons too for a more… "scientific" interpretation? XD Like how do skeletons move if they're just bones, they need a mechanism, my brain says, skipping over the part where it's a living skeleton. Her hair is also a lot more thin and whispy in her reaper form, like a corpse.

As for her outfit, she crashed her car on her way to a friend's party, so I gave her something of a casual cocktail dress. To give the design a little extra detail and give her the hood often associated with a grim reaper, I threw on some cold weather clothes because it was an autumn evening she died on. Something she threw on to keep warm until she'd get to the party kind of thing. I can't for the life of me remember what I referenced for the scarf/hood piece (I think it was a gallery of cyberpunk fashion) but I liked how it came out regardless. Building characters for the town of Eagle Crest has given me more opportunities to look deeper into modern fashion and really expand on it more than I have in the past. There's a lot more options for composition while still looking like something someone could wear on the street without getting any awkward glances than I realized in my earlier years, and I'm having fun exploring!

Description
Yeah I know this isn't the big character at the literal center of the last drawing I posted but I'll get there eventually, trust me XD This is my OC Dawn Hewlett, and she's going to be the main character of the novel I'm working on. Since that project will be the center point of the wider narrative of the Drake Hero universe, I think it's a good place to start. I can use this story to branch both forwards and backwards comfortably as I worldbuild.

Dawn came to me in a dream, a running theme you'll find as I show off my world. I suffer from chronic night terrors, and while most of them are just god awful eldritch madness and screaming monsters, sometimes they're more coherent and my brain tickles its storytelling muscles in my sleep. I figure hell, if I'm stuck having these awful experiences every night, I might as well use the material to make something out of it. It all comes from the same meatball in my skull anyways lol.

Dawn was one of those instances, and her story was one of the clearest nightmares I've had to date. The basic premise is this poor girl who died in a car crash on her way to a party, and her soul is recruited against her will to become the new grim reaper. She has to come to terms not just with her own death, but being assigned to escort other people in various states of acceptance to the veil as well. Along the way, she meets a ragtag band of skeletal specters like herself who had been recruited just like her in previous centuries. All the while, back in the mortal realm, her still living friends have to help her unravel a conspiracy plaguing their fictional hometown of Eagle Crest (known as Suwarrow to the Natives). It's still a work in progress, and obviously I don't want to give away too much since I intend to publish this as a book some day. But I'll be sharing more denizens of Eagle Crest as I write. It helps me visualize a scene when I can match a design to the character speaking.

Design notes, I did my best to pull the details straight from my nightmare. Dawn is an average girl in her human form, but her reaper form is more unique. She (and the other reapers too) was a chalk white specter with only a ghostly off-white outline of what was her flesh in life. I couldn't really get it to come across in the art, but in the dream it was made vividly clear that her bones have strands of calcified muscle attached (the medical term would be Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva if you want a visual reference, but that's a mouthful). Personally I like to draw my skeletons with tendons too for a more… "scientific" interpretation? XD Like how do skeletons move if they're just bones, they need a mechanism, my brain says, skipping over the part where it's a living skeleton. Her hair is also a lot more thin and whispy in her reaper form, like a corpse.

As for her outfit, she crashed her car on her way to a friend's party, so I gave her something of a casual cocktail dress. To give the design a little extra detail and give her the hood often associated with a grim reaper, I threw on some cold weather clothes because it was an autumn evening she died on. Something she threw on to keep warm until she'd get to the party kind of thing. I can't for the life of me remember what I referenced for the scarf/hood piece (I think it was a gallery of cyberpunk fashion) but I liked how it came out regardless. Building characters for the town of Eagle Crest has given me more opportunities to look deeper into modern fashion and really expand on it more than I have in the past. There's a lot more options for composition while still looking like something someone could wear on the street without getting any awkward glances than I realized in my earlier years, and I'm having fun exploring!