I like your current design for your hijab wearin’ warrior a lot! I was thinking some of your working stuff looked a little too homogeneous with the nuns silhouettes but now she’s very distinct, i love the pants and the swooshy bit about the neck! nice work

— lilylilymine

Thanks! The nuns are meant to look really uniform, as a foil to the witches and other characters who are a lot more individualistic in both personality and design. Some of the nuns do have very unique silhuettes, while others are more distinguishable via color palettes and body language. (ie: the twins, who are nearly always acting as one character.)

I’ve been meaning to make a tutorial on using basic shapes to design characters, so this is a good an opportunity as any! (Also, for more info on how I use color as a storytelling element in Sister Claire, here’s a post I made about it!)

As I develop each character, I extract them down to really basic shapes in my head. Protagonists and likable characters tend to have the most circles and round shapes, as well as warmer color palettes.

Claire is the most round (her head and belly echo her circular theme) and even her eyes are totally circular. Aside from the point of her wimple, there are no sharp edges to her design at all- the softness of her design emphasizes her gentleness and unthreatening personality.

Catharine has a very similar shape to Claire, but it’s more elongated and slightly pointed. She’s literally an “edgier” version of Claire. I think of her “base” as an almond shape, reminicent of Claire’s circle but more like a cat’s eye. This is carried across with her almond eyes, jagged lines of her hair, torn clothes, claws and teeth(when possessed), etc.

Despite their differences, I think of the twins as one character. XD;
Their base shape is a heart, because its two sides are mirror images of a curve ending in a point. Their faces echo this shape. Originally I drew them with more soft edges, but as I figured out their personalities and role in the story, I made them “sharper”. This was mainly to contrast with Claire’s soft roundedness and naivite- by contrast, the twins are more fickle, intelligent, and sassy.

Gabrielle’s base shape is a sequence of curves. It shows most prominently in her hair, as well as her other- ahem, assets. It brings to mind waves, bounce, clouds, and feminine curves- all very well suited to a sexy aquatic angel.

The triangular shape is used to symbolize power. For the Muslim character I’m designing, I wanted her to look similar to the nuns, but still have a distinctive design. She also needed to immediately come across as a powerful and capable warrior. I gave her those loose fitting pants to both distinguis her from the nuns and give her a more powerful shape.

Incidentally, a up-pointing triangle shape emphasizes stability, (Mother Superior, + new Muslim character design) while an upside-down triangle has connotations of top-heavyness and instability. (Like Marguerite.) A square has similar connotations, but more emphasis on stability and heavyness. (Sister Olga)

P.S. I got the idea of making the parallel between nuns and women in hijab from Nayzak on deviantart, who has done a lot of artwork showing similarities between women of faith in different religions: