YA Fantasy Character Design
For: Graphic Novel (proposed)
Type: Character Design
Genre: Fantasy
Roles: Writer
“Reva & The Four Skies” is a young-adult / middle-grade fantasy adventure graphic novel about friendship & self-acceptance set in a world of floating islands and great rivers of air currents. I developed this pitch with the artist Anne Marcano. Below, I’ll highlight the work we did together to develop the design for the titular main character, Reva.
The Character
The First Designs
Reva is the core of the ensemble cast of main characters in The Four Skies. To help guide her design, I provided Anne with a detailed description of the character.
Reva (15) grew up on a small island in the South Sky that’s always been little more than a small rest stop for passing airships. As a result, she’s never seen much of the world — though visiting vessels have turned her into quite the dreamer, envious of all the travelers who pass through her home. Stuck at home, Reva instead finds her own freedom in flight, using her glider to ride winds across the island.
You might call her reckless, but the truth is Reva is a natural. She’s more at home in the air than on her own two feet. She’s deeply passionate about flight with a cheerful demeanor and a natural enthusiasm and curiosity for the world around her — to the point of naivety.
She’s often on call to help in her mother’s skydock, and wears a messy jumpsuit (or perhaps overalls) that give her a sort of “worker / engineer” look. I imagine her as lightly tanned, from her time outdoors, with medium-length hair that she can let down when flying and keep tied up in a messy bundle, like it’s an unimportant detail to her.
She was meant to be lightly inspired by Amelia Earheart.
Here are some of the earliest designs Anne drew for the character of Reva.
We landed pretty quickly on the flightsuit look and began experimenting with various details:
Gloves
Shoes & Boots
Face-Shape & Hairstyle
Notes & Iteration
While we really liked the initial designs, we felt there was still an opportunity to better express Reva’s personality, in particular through her face, eyes, and hair. Satisfied with the jumpsuit look we landed on, we explored many different designs. Ultimately, every choice we made was informed by a few core pillars of who Reva was meant to be:
Tanned — She’s an outdoor kid, so a more tanned look would suit the character better.
Balanced Face Shape — Somewhere in between the angular and rounded look we initially explored, we felt the look we landed on gave her the best balance of looking energetic, while still remaining young, cheerful, and bright.
Hair Style — Anne brought a lot to the table here, with tons of different hairstyles to help us see how each style changed her demeanor. We wanted something that would flow well in the wind and a semi mid-length cut that could be wild and free in the air, or corralled into a semblance of tidiness as needed.
COLOR & COMPOSITION
Color was another essential element of Reva’s design.
Ultimately, we chose a hair color for Reva that we felt let her fit into the lineup without distracting from the other characters, but still made her feel visually distinct.
Flight Tech
Individual flight plays a huge role in the story of Reva & The Four Skies. So, it was as important to work on the technology Reva would use to fly as it was to nail down the design of her actual character. Developing the flight tech involved a lot of worldbuilding, developing a way for the world’s magic and technology to interface. But when it came to the visuals of Reva’s glider, we had a few inspirations we were trying to balance:
Free & Flexible — The flight system needed to feel non-restrictive. After Anne’s initial design explorations we concluded that a simple harness or backpack with “back-wings” felt like the best approach to to this.
Animalistic — The dragonfly was a motif throughout the book so we thought to mimic the beautiful coloration and patterning of insect wings with Reva’s own wings.
Speculative Technology — We still wanted the flight system to look technological — even if it was a technology that interfaced with magic. Some of our designs here ended up leaning too far in a science-fiction direction.
Plausible — The science was never going to hold up, but it was important that the motion and function of the flight system still felt plausible so readers would be more able to buy into the world.
Original Glider
Later, we went back and designed one of Reva’s earliest gliders, intending for the story to show her flight system progressing right alongside her flight skills.
