Chapter 1: Page 3
This week we’re introduced to one of Quinlan’s best friends, Janik. As mentioned in the Cast page, Janik is the daughter of Sunsgrove’s ambassador to the Vulpin kingdom of Navran, and is already taking great strides in assuming her father’s duties. She also helps Quinlan stay grounded in reality and aware of his responsibilities to Sunsgrove, as demonstrated in this scene!
Janik’s design has probably changed more over the last few years than all the other characters combined. In the earliest of early concepts, she had a more conventionally “squirrel” look to her, with a smaller mouth, more realistically-proportioned eyes, rounded ears, etc.
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She looked like she might fit right into a Redwall story, so that was problematic, but we also determined that her look was just too conservative when matched up against her personality. So Rachel went back to the drawing board and sketched, and re-sketched, and doodled, and noodled – even at times when there was no proper drawing paper about:
Around this time we also learned that layered outfit designs were a must for our characters’ main outfits. Simple shirts or dresses tend to look less like actual outfits and more like costumes, and layers give us opportunities to change up colors and generally make characters more interesting to look at. Janik’s next major leap forward came from her character drawing in the pitch we put together back in 2009.
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This redesign is a lot closer to what we finally settled on for her design, from the general head shape to the shirt/dress/belt outfit. As you can see in today’s page, a great many tweaks were subsequently done to make her look more animated and pop off of the page a bit (giving her brighter colors and a more expressive face certainly didn’t hurt!)
As you can see, comparing the original sketch of Janik to this fairly recent one, she’s come a long way since the initial character design phase of Beyond the Western Deep. As with all of our characters, her design will change and shift a bit as Rachel experiments more with the style to find what suits her best. We have big plans for Janik, and her position as a future ambassador puts her in a unique position for future events!
Remember, if any of you have any fan-art you would like to share, send it to thewesterndeep (at) gmail (dot) com!
Hehe love it!
Can’t quite tell what emotional Janik has in this strip. Couldn’t decide between angry or some other emotion
Fantastic, as always! ;)
I think I’ve discovered the secret to your expressions. It’s all in the eyebrows, well 40% at least. I’ve always found drawing eyebrows to be especially difficult which is unfortunate considering they are pretty close to the most important facial feature to get right.
I really like Janik’s old design, but her new one is just as cool to me and does seem more flexible and less “Secret of Nimh” which had very subtle expression for a cartoon.
Yes! All in the eyebrows. The first panel she almost looks concerned like a mothery look the second and third panels look more angry.
Really great as always!
Just found a link to this on the belfry webworks, and this certainly caught my eyes. I hope to enjoy this immensely, it looks very interesting, and the style fits very well along with characters that certainly have a way that marks each.
Ah yes, Janik… I think I should spend this page talking about her design. Her personality (which I love) I’ll wait with til later.
I’ve always been rather torn over what I think of her look. When she was first introduced, there was something I didn’t really like about it. I think it was that her fur looked a bit too smooth and that she came across as too human-looking. I think the first panel here shows that – she looks rather creepy in it, with those eyes and that strange nose. On the last one, by contrast, she looks a lot more attractive. However, as was pointed out in this post, Kobb was still in the process of perfecting her look and when we see her next time in the comic (at dinner) she looks awesome.
And even here, she looks better and more interesting than the very first designs, which do indeed come across as rather non-distinct (but still very cute). Good point also about multi-layered clothing – it does make them both more realistic and more interesting.
Nice fan art, too!