Kitab Charaka is my undergraduate thesis. It is a historical digital comic for Indonesian high school students that follows the story of two high school students, Raditya and Vania, as they’re magically thrown back decades into the past. In this section, I am highlighting the steps taken during the process of creating this story, starting from the environmental designs and character designs.
This is the first pass of my Chinese merfolk concept for a project with KG Ming. This started as a random conversation where we were saying that mermaids would look beautiful with flowy clothing like hanfu. Since there are many types of hanfu, I specifically chose the ones with looser robes and outerwear such as beizi, dui ji ruqun, and qixiong ruqun since I thought it would provide for better movement in the water. Her accessories are created from materials found in the water or sea like water lilies, pearls, shells, and abalones. Although they would mostly have long hair, it is typically done in a variety of tied or braided hairstyles for minimum tangling (the sea is full of rubbish).
The design I made for my, KG Ming, and CJ Hudson’s original character in Calamity at Calypso Creek, Deputy Jim Young. Deputy Jim Young is a stern but reasonable kind of person. KG Ming suggested to make the deputy half-Chinese here, which I tried to incorporate into the design
Helena is a character belonging to Drew Misemer who I had the honor of designing for an anthology pitch. The brief I received for her character was ‘evil’. An evil, dangerous, close to feral woman. Imagine someone who finally got to cast off the mask of propriety and show what they are behind it. Based on the brief I’ve gotten, I felt it was important for her to look callous and a bit savage. Someone who looks like she could care less about you except for your demise.
These are character designs I made for Haley Rose-Lyon’s Bi-Card in Bi Visibility #1. Haley gave me full reign for all four of the characters, which I was grateful and honored by. In general, I wanted to make sure that the cast was diverse and didn’t only feature people from one type of ethnicity or race or body type which is why I tried to make their body types all different and their ethnicities different or ambiguous. For the brides’ design, I wanted their clothing to be a bit unconventional but still looking a bit like traditional wedding garb which is why I chose white and light pastel colors (with a hint of the Bi flag colors there). For the agents, I gave them typical agent outfits you would see in most other media, but it was extremely fun to give them all bright colors of the Bi flag.
Unofficial Monster High Redesign
My two spidersonas, Hong Huiran (Hong Zhizhu) and Xu Xia (Zhizhu Dajun) are designed to be connected to one another. Hong Huiran received her powers from a soul-transferring spider bite which allowed her to share her body with the spirit of the ancient spider ‘god’, Zhizhu Dajun. Since her powers are taken from the past, essentially, I want to make sure that her design was a mix between past and present, which is why I chose to incorporate hanfu designs on her upper body and skirt but left most of the rest looking more modern and sleek.
Xu Xia, on the other hand, was a commoner turned spider ‘deity’ in a xianxia setting. His design is primarily inspired by many other martial arts master characters in wuxia/xianxia stories but with less armor. His mask is the spider version of ancient Chinese shamanic mask made of stone or hard materials and he uses the erhu to call upon spiders and control them, similar to the Pied Piper. His color palette used to be red and blue, similar to classic Spider-Man colors, before it was changed to white since red and blue seemed to be too happy for him. White in Chinese culture is associated with death and mourning. He is forever mourning the lives he failed to save. Overall, I wanted to make sure his design gives an air of superiority and power while still keeping simple to hint at his humble roots. Details such as his mask, erhu, and sentient arm wraps were created with Chinese culture and xianxia setting in mind. I wanted him to still clearly be a Spider-Man but with his own twists that comes from his own world.